Migrating existing libraries to libtool

[Keith Packard]

I maintain a few X libraries and would like to see about transitioning 
them from imake to automake.  The stumbling block is that I cannot change 
the library version numbers across this transition on any operating system.

libtool makes this transition system dependent as I must compute the 
correct version-info string for each operating system to have the correct 
library versions generated out the other end.  This is contrary to the 
desired goals of libtool.

I understand the goals of libtools versioning scheme and how it helps 
people resolve library versioning issues on many systems.  In this case, 
it's preventing me from using the tool as I have a few existing systems 
that I need to remain compatible with.

I propose that libtool take a new command line option '-version-number'
which explicitly sets the major/minor/revision number of the output 
library.  This would permit projects to explicitly manage version numbers 
to remain compatible with pre-libtool releases.

-keith