Building shared libraries is different on lots of platforms. There are quite a lot of things common to various platforms (compiling with -fPIC) and oodless of little differences. IMHO libtool is the right thing if you might want to build a shared library and, in my experience, libtool works well with automake.
If you just want to build a few static libraries then libtool and its ilk is serious overkill, as all systems do it using ar, and ranlib if it exists. If ranlib exists it's use for static libraries is frequently mandatory. This was benefitly true on linux in the past, although the latest binutils might have eliminated that requriement. I do not think LyX is following the zlib people and thinking that autoconf, automake, etc are all complex beasts to be avoided like the plague. -- Duncan (-: "software industry, the: unique industry where selling substandard goods is legal and you can charge extra for fixing the problems."
