Re: LT_* equivalent to AC_CHECK_LIB?

[Tim Mooney]

In regard to: Re: LT_* equivalent to AC_CHECK_LIB?, Bob Friesenhahn said...:

> On Mon, 3 Jul 2006, Tim Mooney wrote:
>
> > This seems like it should be an obvious question, but I'm not finding any
> > obvious answers in either the libtool or autoconf documentation.
> >
> > Is there a libtool-aware equivalent to AC_CHECK_LIB?  In other words, if I
> > want to check for foo_amazing_func() in libfoo, and libfoo was built with
> > libtool (and the libfoo.la is hopefully installed on the system), is there
> > an extant macro something like LT_CHECK_LIB(foo,foo_amazing_func) that
> > will try find foo_amazing_func() in libfoo *and* will pull in all the
> > necessary dependencies for libfoo, automatically?
>
> I don't believe there is.  Autoconf can not depend on libtool, so Autoconf 
> should not provide such a macro, but it certainly makes sense for libtool to 
> provide a LT_CHECK_LIB as you describe.  A challenge is that in libtool 2.0, 
> the libtool script is not generated until the end of the configure script run 
> (an `enhancement' in 2.0) so it is not available for use.  The macro would 
> need to emulate the operation of libtool since libtool is not available yet.

Thanks Bob.  It seems like this is one area where pkg-config provides
useful functionality that libtool could but doesn't currently.  I would
prefer to avoid pkg-config, mainly because it introduces another
dependency.

I haven't looked at the upcoming libtool 2.0 much, and I'm sure there's a
very good reason for delaying the generation of libtool until the end of
the configure run, but it does appear that it's unfortunate from the
aspect of creating a macro like the one we're talking about.

Tim
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