On Mon, 14 Oct 2002, Max Bowsher wrote:
I floated an idea on how to get around that: Adjust the libtool invocation
command (as determined in libtool.m4) to be "libtool --bindir=$(bindir)" (or
perhaps with appropriate quoting). The idea being that when used from an
autoconf-based makefile (is it even possible to do otherwise, now there is
no ltconfig?), the make variable bindir is passed on to libtool. Kludgy,
yes, but better than ../bin. Of course, libtool would need to detect an
invalid bindir and fall back on ../bin. I haven't fully worked this through
yet, though, as I've just started university, so am a bit busy, and to top
it off, my hard drive is making loud clicking noises and bluescreening my
laptop from time to time.
Be very careful about your assumptions! Libtool is certainly usable
all by itself and may be used to install packages into a different
directory from the one it is installed in. Libtool only needs
autoconf in order to be installed, and is delivered from the FSF as a
configurable stand-alone package. In a perfect world, every system
would come with a perfectly working libtool, and packages wouldn't
need to worry about including it, or configuring it.
The idea of supporting a --bindir option is tempting, but then
'libtool --mode=install' stops looking like a simple install program,
and in fact, the --bindir option would need to be passed for several
different phases of libtool operation since it would influence the
content of the library.la file. Since Windows may be the only OS
benefiting from this, we could have a case of the tail wagging the
dog.