On Sat, 25 Jun 2005, Hrvoje Niksic wrote: > Despite the apparent consensus that it should be integrated in > Autoconf, the integration never materialized. When I queried about > this in 2003 (http://tinyurl.com/a63lc), the single response > charmingly told me that "the solution is libtool." I now think the > appropriate answer to that should have been, "Libtool -- just say NO!"
Well, this is certainly an overstatement, but you certainly have a point. The idea behind libtool is good and the implementation is reasonable. Bugs are of course inevitable and you shouldn't be surprised seeing them especially as on exotic platforms (you even admit you've never been able to reproduce some of the other's problems on your systems). GNU software relies on public testing, but unfortunately many users fail to provide useful reports for bugs they spot and for those exotic platforms it may mean nobody ever knows about them. You're certainly right C++/Fortran/whatever tests are superfluous, not only for wget -- they should probably only be enabled on demand, like GCJ tests already are. That should qualify as a bug -- but have you filed it to the libtool team? You mentioned the lack of documentation, but it doesn't appear magically by itself, does it? Perhaps nobody else tried to use libtool like wget did. Yours could be a useful experience -- have you considered submitting your results for inclusion? Having said that I have to admit you are probably right with your decision -- OpenSSL are not libtool libraries and this is probably the most important cause of problems. For building programs rather than libraries themselves libtool is most useful when libtool libraries are involved. In this case for example it can help with pulling dependencies for static libraries (archives) that do not record that information themselves. With non-libtool libraries you need to discover it yourself anyway. Finally, there are so many people complaining about libtool -- but how many of them actually did anything to make it better? Of these, how many failed to achieve their goal due to a conceptual problem with libtool? -- only these can actually claim they have rights to blame libtool. Everyone else please either file bug reports (or better yet fix bugs you trip over) or keep silent. Maciej
