libltdl apparently totally broken

[Paul Davis]

i recently upgraded to libtool 1.4.2, only to find myself back in a
place i'd rather not be: cursing expletives at libtool. a program that
uses ltdl extensively now crashes without fail. a quick check in gdb
reveals that

        1) its easy to cause a NULL dirname argument to be sent
            to tryall_dlopen_module(), causing a segv
        2) it seems remarkably easy to cause handle->loader to be
            unset on an apparently successful call to lt_dlopen(),
            causing a segv later.

in looking at how both of these things happen, it appears to me that
there is some completely untested code that has been introduced here,
and rather than try to patch it, i would rather find out first if
anybody actually believes that the code that is there should work.

i'd like to see this work, and i'm willing to write patches. but i
have to say that in 2 years of using libtool, i have had nothing but
intense aggravation when doing so. in marked contrast to automake,
which has generally been easy and worked just the way i would expect
it to, and autoconf, which has worked reasonably well and sort of the
way i would expect it to, libtool has constantly confused me, failed
to work, and/or needlessly complicated my development cycle. i believe
its developers in their claim that libtool's approach is the best one
there is, but something inside me simply can't believe that any of
this makes sense. it seems that in trying to cover both program-driven
run-time explicit linking and linker-driven run-time implicit linking,
things have gotten a little out of hand ... but who really knows?

--p