packaging shared libraries without autoconf and automake

[Eric Smith]

I'm building a package for levmar.  Upstream does not use autoconf, 
automake, or libtool.  The supplied makefile builds a statically linked 
library, liblevmar.a.  With trivial changes I can build a shared library 
liblevmar.so instead, and I've verified that this works with the 
supplied demo program.

I don't want to replace the upstream Makefile with use of autoconf and 
automake, and the libtool documentation doesn't really explain how to 
use libtool without those.  Can I just do the shared library versioning 
"by hand", by creating the appropriate symlinks in the package?  Or is 
there some other preferred way to deal with this kind of situation?

Thanks!
Eric