config.m4 Macros and static libs

Dear List, My request is a little arkward, since I am not too familiar with the gnu build tools. I want to write a PECL extension for PHP that exploits the features of a specific lib. Unfortunately the lib is only available as static lib (actually it's two libs - anyhow, this shouldn't change too much). As far as I could gather from the m4 file that defines the PHP_* Macros, the PHP_CHECK_LIBRARY Macro only works for shared libs. What would be the propfer way to check for the presence and usability, of those libs? I could use AC_CHECK_FILES of course and see if I can find the object archives (.a static libs), but this doesn'T seem to be the proper way. And after that, how would I then pass those two additional .a files to the compiler during the linking (will PHP_ADD_LIBRARY work for static libs?) I dug through the mailing list archives but could not find anything appropriate. If I missed out on something, please kindly advise documentation pointers. Thanks in advance for your help Reagrds -Sven Eschenberg