where should libtool libraries be installed? /usr/lib? /usr/local/lib?

[Ed Hartnett]

Howdy all!

I am working on a free software library for climate scientists and
meteorologists.

I'm converting the library to use libtool, but I have a very basic
question: where should my library (by default) be installed?

In the good old days, I would have unhesitatingly answered
/usr/local/lib. But it seems that, when linking, libtool itself does
not look in /usr/local/lib by default. (Or am I missing something?)

In any case, my question is: where, in the opinion of the average
libtool guru, should a general purpose scientific library be
installed?

It is unlikely that users will use libtool to link to this library. I
would like them (as in the good old days) to just put -lLIBNAME on
their compiler command and have it find the library.

There is a school of thought (in this project) that the library should
ultimately be installed (in default cases) in some subdirectory of the
source code. Ease of having multiple versions of the library is cited
as a supporting reason for this school of thought.

Of course, in that case, a -I and -L option also must be provided by
the user, to allow the compiler to find the include files, and the
linker to find the library.

Thanks for any answers!

Ed

-- 
Ed Hartnett  -- address@hidden