Solaris and socket library

[John Ling <jling at bioinformatics dot ubc dot ca>]

I am running on Solaris and I was trying to compile an application that 
used the libmysqlclient.a library.

I encountered an error:

Undefined                       first referenced
symbol                             in file
socket                              
/usr/local/mysql4/lib/libmysqlclient.a(libmysql.o)
getpeername                         
/usr/local/mysql4/lib/libmysqlclient.a(viosocket.o)
setsockopt                          
/usr/local/mysql4/lib/libmysqlclient.a(viosocket.o)
getservbyname                       
/usr/local/mysql4/lib/libmysqlclient.a(libmysql.o)
getsockopt                          
/usr/local/mysql4/lib/libmysqlclient.a(libmysql.o)
shutdown                            
/usr/local/mysql4/lib/libmysqlclient.a(viosocket.o)
connect                             
/usr/local/mysql4/lib/libmysqlclient.a(libmysql.o)
ld: fatal: Symbol referencing errors.


Now the solution was to add a -lsocket to the linking options.
But, should this not be something that autoconf or automake suite of 
tools detect and automatically handle for me?  Do I need to manually add 
this only when I run on Solaris?

Now that I do need to handle this.  Where is the best place to check the 
OS environment variable to see if I need to set this as a variable 
somewhere.  I wanted to do something like:

ifeq ($(OSTYPE),solaris)
     export SOCKET = -lsocket
endif

Do I do this in configure.in somehow or in Makefile.am?  Is there a 
better way anyone can suggest.  I would think something like this is a 
common problem to handle.

Thanks,
John Ling