Hi,
Usually programs that are fully autoconf-iscated will ship a subset of libtool sources in the tarball, build a custom version at configure time, and invoke it from the Makefile via ./libtool. This has the advantage that only the maintainer needs to have libtool installed. OTOH we do not use Autoconf and I think this contributes to 99% of the bad name for Autoconf, so it's not something we want.
Another option would be to not use autoconf at all. Building ELF shared libs isn't that difficuilt these days. Question is whenever there is any non-ELF platform we care about (Windows maybe?).
cheers, Gerd
