Re: gnulib-tool: make it possible to install the generated library

[Bruno Haible]

Ralf Wildenhues wrote:
> installing
> a library that contains some public symbols corresponding to gnulib
> modules, thus having generic names (and thus possibly conflicting with
> other libraries) seems to me unfortunate at best.
> 
> So even if turns out to be necessary for libgettextlib to do so, I would
> strongly advise against this practice in general.  If gnulib modules end
> up in shared libraries, they better have a stable and defined interface,
> and gnulib carry the notion of an incompatible interface change;
> something which authors have so far (rightly!) refused here.

But libgettextlib is 1. undocumented, 2. carries the version number of
the gettext release.

For documented libraries, where I attempt to have backward compatibility,
I use libtool's -version-info option.

For undocumented libraries, where there are no backward compatibility
guarantees of any kind, I use libtool's -release option.

This is precisely as the libtool manual recommends it.

The only (more theoretical) problem is that some documented library,
libgettextpo, depends on libgettextlib and libgettextsrc. But there are
not many candidate of programs that could use libgettextpo, so I believe
collisions with other libraries can be handled on demand.

Bruno