Re: Shared libraries

["Gary V. Vaughan" <gary@...>]

> On 14 May 2014, at 12:35, William Ahern <william@25thandClement.com> wrote:
> 
> I'll tell you what's wrong with libtool: versioning. There are a gazillion
> GNU versions,

Not true.

There is 2.4.2, the core stable release since Oct 2011. I make releases every 3-4 years in general.

> and the most recent versions aren't intended to be used
> outside of a full-blown autotools build environment.

Absolutely not true.

I explicitly state that Libtool can be used without the other autotools in the manual. It is one of the goals of the project to support that usage model. You don't even need Autotools to install Libtool, nor to use the installed version. If you want to build a custom in tree Libtool script for your package at build time, then you'll need Autotools of course, but the only reason people still do that is momentum from the 10-15 year old Libtool releases where you couldn't rely on an installed system Libtool.

> (You can make it work,
> of course, but the authors have explicitly said they aren't interested in
> supporting independent usage.)

Not true. I've never said that.

If you are having trouble, I'll be happy to help you use it correctly. Or if you've found a bug, please report it on bug-libtool@gnu.org, and I'll endeavor to fix it.

> Plus OS X and OpenBSD have their own
> proprietary versions which mimic different, ancient libtool versions.

I don't use BSD so can't comment on what they do.

OSX had an entirely unrelated program called libtool, so you have to either install glibtool with mac ports or Homebrew, or use the in-tree Libtool that most packages continue to distribute.  In any case, I have downloaded and installed Libtool 2.4.2 from ftp.gnu.org on all my macs for several years without any special changes or local patches required. In fact my main dev machine for the last several releases is a Mac.

> So the
> invocations are different across platforms unless you include a copy,

That is the thinking that is keeping other packages in the wrong mindset. And I don't believe it has been true for many many years.

It's perfectly valid (and in fact preferred) to just make your Libtool using package depend on an installed Libtool. Just like if you have a package that needs GTK+, you expect your users to arrange for libgtk to be installed first! No need to ship the entire sources for GTK+ and its dependencies in every GTK+ using package.

> but
> there's no independently maintained libtool script anymore;

Why do you think that? I've been maintaining it for more than 20 years, and quickly made releases that work independently of Autotools. It is stable enough that bug fix releases only come along every few years these days, and 2.4.2 continues to work very well stand alone as far as I can tell on the 25 or so architectures I test on.

> it's tied into
> autotools.

Nope!

Cheers,
-- 
Gary V. Vaughan (gary AT vaughan DOT pe)