a few days ago, we have switched the ports tree's default libtool from gnu to our own version living in ports/infrastructure/bin/libtool. any port that sets USE_LIBTOOL=yes will now use this.
major advantages include: - reduced build time by avoiding relinking during installation reported to reduce ports bulk build time by about 15% - improved library search, which provides correct linking at build time, allowing to build a port while an older version of the package is already installed of course, this is well integrated with the ports infrastructure and automatically honors library versions specified in SHARED_LIBS. there are some features of gnu libtool which we don't support at this time, such as the -dlopen flag and use of the libltdl library... but these are used only in a small minority of ports anyway. these will be built using gnu libtool. so gnu libtool will remain in the ports tree as well, and it can be used by setting USE_LIBTOOL=gnu. if you run into issues with this new libtool, please let us know.
