+dnl for convenience, sort the files to build in alphabetical order
+dnl
+dnl another shell command to do it which might be faster but is less clear:
+dnl LTLIBOBJS="`for obj in $LTLIBOBJS; do echo $obj; done | sort | sed 's@^@ @'`"
+LTLIBOBJS="`echo $LTLIBOBJS | tr -s ' ' | tr ' ' '\n' | sort | tr '\n' ' '`"
+
+dnl for convenience, sort the samples in alphabetical order
+dnl
+dnl FIXME For some mysterious reasons, sometimes the directories are duplicated
+dnl in this list - hence uniq. But normally, this shouldn't be needed!
+SAMPLES_SUBDIRS="`echo $SAMPLES_SUBDIRS | tr -s ' ' | tr ' ' '\n' | sort | uniq | tr '\n' ' '`"
+