Status of libtool 2.2.X?

Sam Varshavchik mrsam at courier-mta.com
Fri Oct 10 22:10:49 UTC 2008


Adam Jackson writes:

> Most of the complexity in libtool (and autotools in general) is to
> support systems that simply are not worth supporting and that
> practically speaking don't exist anymore.  I'm being slightly flip in
> saying 'gcc -shared' but really not by much.  Honestly for any fringe
> platform the correct thing to do is port gcc/binutils/gmake first.

There's much more to libtool then just building shared libraries. If you 
remove everything from libtool that supports ancient platforms, you'll still 
have quite a bit left.

For example, libtool builds both shared and static libraries in parallel. 
That, alone, saves you from dealing with a massive hairball in your 
makefiles. Ask anyone who works on a large, complicated app, that links with 
its own shared libraries. The option to easily build a statically-linked 
version is quite invaluable, for debugging purposes.

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