Re: Chosing between system and builtin library

[Ralf Wildenhues]

Hi Sylvain,

* Sylvain Beucler wrote on Tue, Oct 14, 2008 at 08:55:56PM CEST:
> 
> (I'm not 100% sure this is the right list, please let me know if this
> is the case :))

Good enough, I'd say.

> I'd like to implement something like gettext's inclusion of 'libintl',
> which can be either included in the source tarball (for users), or
> reused from a system library (for distros).
> 
> gettext's implementation looks complicated. Is there an easier way to
> do the job? I'm pretty sure there are some caveats to be aware of when
> specifying the library.

I think so.  FWIW libltdl is similar (but probably even more
complicated).

Anyway, for a start I'd try to use an AC_CONFIG_SUBDIRS in the toplevel
package (ignores non-existent subdirs), a subdir conigure for the
library, and set LIBFOO, LTLIBFOO, INCFOO (or whatever naming)
accordingly in a m4 macro that you ship to use.  The important bit when
using libtool is that you specify (and use) LTLIBFOO as sub/libfoo.la
when internal.  I think the gnulib module havelib can help you.

Hope that helps.

Cheers,
Ralf