partially related to how Automake is calling libtool from the build rules (it is missing the --tag option),
I added the tags to automake as previously posted here. (https://debbugs.gnu.org/cgi/bugreport.cgi?bug=67539) no tag defined for Objective C[1] (presumably it would be --tag=OBJC) ... "If [libtool] can't infer a tag, then it defaults to the configuration for the C language" ... lobby for the manual to change rather than rollback the behavior. I wrote bug-libtool about these things. https://debbugs.gnu.org/cgi/bugreport.cgi?bug=67754 Thanks, Karl