9.1.2 Linking the program

If you need to link against libraries that are not found by configure, you can use LDADD to do so. This variable is used to specify additional objects or libraries to link with; it is inappropriate for specifying specific linker flags, you should use AM_LDFLAGS for this purpose.

Sometimes, multiple programs are built in one directory but do not share the same link-time requirements. In this case, you can use the ‘prog_LDADD’ variable (where prog is the name of the program as it appears in some ‘_PROGRAMS’ variable, and usually written in lowercase) to override the global LDADD. If this variable exists for a given program, then that program is not linked using LDADD.

For instance, in GNU cpio, pax, cpio and mt are linked against the library libcpio.a. However, rmt is built in the same directory, and has no such link requirement. Also, mt and rmt are only built on certain architectures. Here is what cpio’s src/Makefile.am looks like (abridged):

bin_PROGRAMS = cpio pax @MT@
libexec_PROGRAMS = @RMT@
EXTRA_PROGRAMS = mt rmt

LDADD = ../lib/libcpio.a @INTLLIBS@
rmt_LDADD =

cpio_SOURCES = …
pax_SOURCES = …
mt_SOURCES = …
rmt_SOURCES = …

‘prog_LDADD’ is inappropriate for passing program-specific linker flags (except for ‘-l’, ‘-L’, ‘-dlopen’ and ‘-dlpreopen’). So, use the ‘prog_LDFLAGS’ variable for this purpose.

It is also occasionally useful to have a program depend on some other target which is not actually part of that program. This can be done using the ‘prog_DEPENDENCIES’ variable. Each program depends on the contents of such a variable, but no further interpretation is done.

If ‘prog_DEPENDENCIES’ is not supplied, it is computed by Automake. The automatically-assigned value is the contents of ‘prog_LDADD’, with most configure substitutions, ‘-l’, ‘-L’, ‘-dlopen’ and ‘-dlpreopen’ options removed. The configure substitutions that are left in are only ‘@LIBOBJS@’ and ‘@ALLOCA@’; these are left because it is known that they will not cause an invalid value for ‘prog_DEPENDENCIES’ to be generated.