Status of libtool 2.2.X?

[Daniel P. Berrange]

On Fri, Oct 10, 2008 at 02:51:17PM -0400, Adam Jackson wrote:
> On Fri, 2008-10-10 at 11:31 -0700, Toshio Kuratomi wrote:
> > David Woodhouse wrote:
> > > On Wed, 2008-10-08 at 19:36 +0200, Karsten Hopp wrote:
> > >> Getting libtool-2.2 into F-11 is my plan, but I most likely need to get that through
> > >> FESCo as it breaks up to 300 packages according to my mass rebuilds. I'm going to
> > >> prepare a Wiki page with details about that.
> > > 
> > > Isn't the whole point of libtool that it should make things _easier_,
> > > not break huge swathes of packages whenever we change it?
> > > 
> > > How about we fix those 300 packages by making them _not_ use libtool,
> > > rather than making them use the latest version?
> > > 
> > Hand coding Makefiles to compile shared libraries on all platforms is .
> >  Before libtools many upstreams simply wouldn't package shared libraries
> > because of all the problems with getting it right for SunOS, Solaris,
> > OpenBSD, NetBSD, i386BSD, FreeBSD, AIX, Linux-aout, Linux-elf, gcc, acc,
> > etc.  If the state of the art has advanced and there's a tool that can
> > replace libtool so a developer can say "I want a shared library" and the
> > tool builds it on all platforms then we could look into getting
> > upstreams to switch but simply getting rid of libtool in favour of
> > handcoding Makefiles to build shared libraries is a step in the wrong
> > direction.
> 
> The state of the art is "gcc -shared".

Not so much if you're trying to build for windows. The mingw32 work
has only been made viable because libtool has basically taken care 
of the horrible shared library build process required by Windows.

Daniel
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