Thanks for all the help. I'll address the paths in later refinements, but for now, I'd like to understand why the error is happening in this particular instance.
> I'm not quite sure what you mean with this. Can you give an example? > Or do you mean the translation from > lib_LTLIBRARIES = libxy-.z.la > to > libxy__z_la_SOURCES = ... > > ? That is documented in 'info Automake Canonicalization'. Yes, thank you. canonicalization is exactly what I was talking about. In my current Makefile.am: AM_CPPFLAGS = -I/usr/include/lua5.1 -I/usr/include/cairo -I/usr/include/directfb -I/usr/include/freetype2 lib_LTLIBRARIES = liblua5.1-cairo.la liblua5_1_cairo_la_LIBADD = -llua5.1 -L/usr/lib -lcairo -L/usr/lib -ldirectfb -L/usr/lib -lfreetype -L/usr/lib liblua5_1_cairo_la_SOURCES = src/lcairo.c Leads to: /bin/bash ../../libtool --tag=CC --mode=link gcc -g -O2 -o liblua5.1-cairo.la -rpath /usr/local/lib lcairo.lo -llua5.1 -L/usr/lib -lcairo -L/usr/lib -ldirectfb -L/usr/lib -lfreetype -L/usr/lib -lgstapp-0.10 -lgstreamer-0.10 -lcairo -lapr-1 -llua5.1 libtool: link: gcc -shared .libs/lcairo.o -Wl,-rpath -Wl,/home/wesleysmith/Documents/luaav3/modules/cairo/.libs -Wl,-rpath -Wl,/usr/local/lib/lua/5.1 -L/usr/lib -ldirectfb /usr/lib/libfreetype.so -lgstapp-0.10 /usr/lib/libgstreamer-0.10.so /home/wesleysmith/Documents/luaav3/modules/cairo/.libs/libcairo.so /usr/lib/libapr-1.so /usr/lib/liblua5.1.so -pthread -Wl,-soname -Wl,liblua5.1-cairo.so.0 -o .libs/liblua5.1-cairo.so.0.0.0 It's for some reason looking for /home/wesleysmith/Documents/luaav3/modules/cairo/.libs/libcairo.so, which doesn't make sense. Firstly, this file doesn't exist, and I'm not building it in my build process. Instead, I'm trying to use it to build a Lua module called liblua5.1-cairo.la. Is there anything in the above Makefile.am that would generate such a path? wes