On Tue, 4 Mar 2008, Gary V. Vaughan wrote:
My point is that as the master version advances in time, the baseline for
submitted patches will become more and more different. Eventually a patch
from the master version can not reasonably be applied against a stable
branch.
That's no different to the effort involved in porting fixes on branch-1-5
forward to HEAD in CVS.
Exactly. This was not an easy chore even though CVS could give you a
nice diff. If major libtool releases can occur much more often, then
there should be less pain from maintaining branches.
Incidentally, I suppose we should set about defining a sensible set of goals
for Libtool 2.4 reasonably soon... I'll raise that again when 2.2.2 is done.
The only two big things I can think of are
o Better Windows support (for non-GNU compilers).
o Multi-lib/multi-arch support (including building the libs).
We have contributed patches for some of this already. I would be
happy if 2.4 popped out with just the Windows part since
multi-lib/multi-arch may be a big project and requires more consensus.
It would also be nice if autoconf and libtool could work with a
DTrace-fortified shell
(http://blogs.sun.com/tpenta/entry/psarc_2008_008_dtrace_provider) so
that we can do some really good performance profiling on it and make
it faster. There is likely some low-lying fruit that we are not aware
of.
I'm looking forward to your patches now :-D
My motiviations toward libtool are mostly selfish in that libtool is
vital to other software I develop and maintain. When libtool becomes
a blocker, then my motiviation level becomes high. :-)
The 2.2 release is the first libtool release which satisfies all of my
requirements (except for non-GNU Windows) in the last eleven years.
In other words, it is the first libtool release that I feel
comfortable with not using a development version in my released
software. That is quite an achievement.
Bob
======================================
Bob Friesenhahn
[EMAIL PROTECTED], http://www.simplesystems.org/users/bfriesen/
GraphicsMagick Maintainer, http://www.GraphicsMagick.org/
