libtool question

[Bob Rossi]

Hi,

I have a project called CGDB that uses a library from another project
called gdbmi. The gdbmi project only creates a library. The two projects
are packaged together and look like 
  cgdb/
  cgdb/lib/gdbmi/

where cgdb/ has all the stuff for cgdb and cgdb/lib/gdbmi/ is all the
stuff for the gdbmi package.

The gdbmi project has it's own configure.in script and the CGDB 
configure.in script does AC_CONFIG_SUBDIRS([lib/gdbmi]).

gdbmi used to use AC_PROG_RANLIB. By doing this, it would create a
libgdbmi.a and the CGDB package would do 

cgdb_LDFLAGS = \
-L$(top_builddir)/lib/gdbmi/src

cgdb_DEPENDENCIES = \
$(top_srcdir)/lib/gdbmi/src

cgdb_LDADD = ... -lgdbmi ...

My first question is, does it even make sense for the cgdb Makefile.am
files to use the LDFLAGS, DEPENDENCIES and LDADD variables for a library
that is created in a sub configure.in? If this isn't the way to do it,
what is?

My second question is, now that I'm switching over to libtool, can I
still depend on the libgdbmi.a file to be in the gdbmi builddir after I
type make? It seems as if libtool creates the libraries during the 'make
install' instead of during the make phase.

Sorry for all the questions, I'm new to libtool.

Thanks,
Bob Rossi