Uninstalled interlibrary dependencies

[Magnus Lie Hetland]

Hi!

I'm writing a C++ library along with a wrapper for Python (generated  
by SWIG), and I'm using Autotools for building it all. The way I  
build it, I have one core library, of the form libfoo.la, and one  
wrapper library, _foo.la. The _foo.la library (or, rather, _foo.so or  
the like) will be dynamically loaded into the Python interpreter.

This seems to work nicely ... mostly. But the problem is that I write  
my test suite in Python, so I need to dynamically load _foo.so before  
installing, and that doesn't seem to be altogether straightforward.  
The problem is (as I'm sure you already understand) that _foo.so  
refers to the libfoo.la file -- but at the -rpath location.

I see that Libtool goes to great lengths to have things work before  
installing -- but I haven't been able to make it do what I need. The  
automatic relinking of executables, for example, doesn't apply. I had  
some hopes when I discovered the --enable-fast-install=no option, but  
that didn't do anything either, as far as I can see. When I came  
across the following quote in the manual, I was rather discouraged:  
"In the current implementation, libtool libraries may not depend on  
other uninstalled libtool libraries."

Does this mean that I can't do what I'm trying to do -- that is, that  
there is no switch or mechanism in Autotools (or, more specifically,  
Libtool) that will make it work?

If so, what would be the "best" approach to get a similar effect? I  
can see a couple of possibilities, at least:

  - Statically link _foo.la with libfoo.la, so there is no dependency
    (but a *slight* bloat :)

  - Do some Automake magic (or just add some instructions to the  
README file,
    though that would break distcheck) to run configure and install  
in a
    sandbox before testing (rather cumbersome)

Any other suggestions or input?

--
Magnus Lie Hetland
http://hetland.org