Re: Constantly changing libtool

[Paul Smith]

On Thu, 2021-04-15 at 08:33 -0500, Laurence Marks wrote:
> In the same way as autoXZY sets up Makefiles in an OS independent
> fashion, there should be a way to autoupdate autoXYZ files for each
> system without user intervention. (I don't mean automake itself or
> similar, I do mean only the local files.) In an ideal world this
> would be a macro in configure.ac....

The problem comes (IMO) from checking in generated files.  If you only
check in actual source files, not generated files, then you don't run
into these issues with different people having different versions of
build tools.

For GNU make I never check in any files generated by running autotools:
I check in configure.ac and Makefle.am and that's all.  I don't even
check in .po files (latest versions pulled automatically by the build
config) or gnulib-installed files (installed during config as well).

Of course, this means that everyone who wants to build the software
needs to have their own local copy of ALL the tools needed to do so,
including autoconf, automake, and libtool (actually we don't use
libtool for GNU make but...).  There's never a free lunch so you just
have to decide which cost is more dear.