On Thu, 7 Jun 2001, Johnny C. Lam wrote:

: I'm willing to do the majority of the work to implement this solution,
: but I'm hoping for some discussion on my theory of how to solve this
: problem.

Have you thought about possibly using autoconf (on packages that use GNU
autoconf -- a huge number of them) to change the CHECK_LIB macro to default
to not finding a library unless --enable-libfoo is specified?

Then just run autoconf as a build dependency, specify explicit
--enable-libfoo switches, and voila, clean build.

-- 
-- Todd Vierling <tv@wasabisystems.com>  *  Wasabi NetBSD:  Run with it.
-- NetBSD 1.5 now available on CD-ROM  --  http://www.wasabisystems.com/