Status of libtool 2.2.X?

[Braden McDaniel]

On Mon, 2008-10-13 at 01:26 -0400, D. Hugh Redelmeier wrote:
> | From: Braden McDaniel <braden at endoframe.com>
> 
> | Yes, but the kind of patches that should be sent upstream are not the
> | ones resulting in 300 busted packages from a libtool upgrade.  We're
> | talking about patches applied by a specfile build.
> 
> Could you characterize the problems that cause 300 busted packages?

I couldn't.  I hope Karsten Hopp will (the "300" figure comes from him);
he's said he's preparing a wiki page with this information.  (See
earlier in this thread.)

> Naive questions:
> 
> - Might a reasonable patch to libtool 2.2 fix a lot of these problems?
>   (And no, I don't mean "patch it back to 2.1.")

I don't know.  (And FYI, Fedora never shipped 2.1; I think it wasn't
released.  I think the 2.2 series succeeds the 1.5 one.)

> - Would it make sense to allow multiple versions of libtools co-exist
>   on a system and allow a .spec declaration of some kind specify which
>   to use?

That possibility has been floated; and things might even be leaning that
way.  See bug 459387.

I don't have an objection to that approach as long as "libtoolize" (and
similar) refers to the latest version of the tool--just as "autoconf" or
"automake" refer to the latest versions of those tools.  And as long as
that's the case, specfiles for libtool2-incompatible packages that run
autoreconf or libtoolize will need to make at least minor changes to
request the old version.

-- 
Braden McDaniel                           e-mail: <braden at endoframe.com>
<http://endoframe.com>                    Jabber: <braden at jabber.org>