libtool (was Re: [AD] 4.0.2 release)

[Peter Wang <tjaden@xxxxxxxxxx>]

On 2002-06-11, George <gfoot@xxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> On Tue, Jun 11, 2002 at 12:34:16AM +1000, Peter Wang wrote:
> > PS. Reading libtool's documentation and some course notes, it seems Unix
> > shared library mechanisms vary a lot.  I'm specifically worried about
> > the above block.  Symlinking might not be the normal way things are done
> > on a particular Unix.  Dunno if it's worth fixing or using libtool.
> 
> Actually I think the links are meant to be created by ldconfig,
> I don't know whether that didn't work or something, it's too
> long ago. :)

On Linux at least.  I put in the symlinking based on a telnet session to
Matthew Leverton's FreeBSD box.  It was a painfully slow connection so I
didn't hang around to investigate the correct way.

> FWIW, I looked into libtool before doing the shared library
> stuff, but it seemed really hacky and horrible.
[snip]
> Maybe I'm just scared of magic, but I'd much rather have
> separate libtool commands to compile, link, make libraries, and
> so on, with their own options to control what is going on.

I guess people put up with it because nobody else wants to collect
incantations for various obsole^Wobscure platforms.

> I find that I'm less dismissing of libtool now than I was at the
> time, but it's still not very elegant.

Some of the inelegance is probably unavoidable, given the mess it tries
to hide.  I'll give them some credit for being able to write a 5000 line
(presumably) portable shell script... *fingers in throat sound*

> Hmm, I wonder if it supports DLLs though? ;)

Seems to.  You'd need Cygwin or equivalent, though.

-- 
王浩禎