Hrvoje Niksic <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> writes:
> "Dan Harkless" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> writes:
> > > Libtool is not the be-all end-all answer to our linking problems,
> > > even if we wish it were. Maybe these things are easier to achieve
> > > with libtool than without it, but it doesn't come without a cost.
> >
> > Is autoconf the be-all end-all answer to our (non-shared-library)
> > portability problems? Does it come without a cost?
>
> The point is that we should weigh the costs and the benefits.
> Autoconf comes with a *lot* of benefits. Automake on the other hand
> has a few benefit, but the cost is IMO unacceptable. I haven't yet
> decided about libtool, but on a first glance it seems that its
> benefits are very dubious at best.
>
> If it were only up to me, I would give libtool a few years to mature
> before using it on my project. I'm just not confident in the thing.
> This was not the case with Autoconf when I started using it.
All the arguments against libtool so far have focused on things it does
wrong when building libraries. I haven't seen any data leading me to
believe it's incapable of doing the simpler job we're using it for, of
linking to shared libraries.
> > libtool may not be perfect, but it sure seems to me that an
> > imperfect but usually correctly-functioning libtool is better than
> > having --with-ssl simply fail unless you do a bunch of manual
> > LDFLAGS/LIBS environment variable voodoo that's different on each
> > platform.
>
> It might be better to simply improve our configure platform support
> than to suffer with libtool bug workarounds.
I remain to be convinced that any such workarounds will be necessary. And I
still don't think it makes sense to reinvent the wheel in every package's
configure script, if libtool does a decent job of linking your package to
shared libraries in the majority of cases.
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Dan Harkless | To help prevent SPAM contamination,
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