Abusing libtool for library checks?

[Lars Hecking]

 Similar questions may have been asked before, but not always with a
 satisfatory answer IMHO.

 I want to check for a certain library. E.g. I would use something like

 AC_ARC_WITH(foo,
 [  --with-foo[=PREFIX] .... ] ...)

 where PREFIX is used to search for libfoo in PREFIX/lib, and related
 headers in PREFIX/include. If these directories exist, I can modify
 CPPFLAGS/LDFLAGS accordingly, proceed with AC_CHECK_LIB(foo,func...), and
 so on.

 However, this often fails with shared libraries. E.g. on Solaris < 8, there
 is no way to configure the dynamic linker to search non-standard locations
 (or there was a conscious decision to not add the library location to ld.so's
 search path; that's why --with-foo accepts a path argument). One either has
 to specify appropriate LDFLAGS in the environment, or hardcode -R/rpath into
 configure. The former requires that the user has sufficient knowledge to
 supply the correct LDFLAGS, the latter requires a lot of effort on the
 maintainer's side to keep configure portable across platforms.

 Most packages I checked roll their own code for this (php-4.x/aclocal.m4
 makes interesting reading ;-). But I was wondering whether it is possible
 to use libtool for such library checks, as it already has all the
 system-specific information about linker flags etc. Has anyone considered
 or even tried this before? It is a bit different from library/convenience
 library creation.

 Environment: autoconf 2.54/automake 1.7.1/libtool 1.4.2 (yes, I have seen
 the light, for a new project anyhow :)