Re: Customizing soname

[Ralf Wildenhues]

Hello Bob, Alon,

* Bob Friesenhahn wrote:
>
> Your request is the first I can recall for supporting the ability to  
> customize soname.

There was an earlier, much more elaborate one, by Keith Packard,
<http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.comp.gnu.libtool.general/6213>.
And we never applied anything there *because* there was no
patch that was nicely portable, or even degrade gracefully on
lesser capable platforms, IIRC.

* Alon Bar-Lev wrote:
> It is doable... But in what price?
> 
> Patching libtool with three lines to add ability to override soname
> and use 5 line simple automake rules.
> 
> Or write complex build rules and remove/add parts if automake chooses to
> not generate/generate libtool stuff, and maintaining these complex
> rules of about 30 lines.

Well, I haven't looked much at your 30 lines of Makefile.am, but I can
tell you maintaining those 30 lines is going to be *far less* hassle
than getting -soname support right.

> install-exec-local: install-libLTLIBRARIES
>         mv -f "$(DESTDIR)$(libdir)/module1.so" "$(DESTDIR)$(libdir)/@MYNAME@"

FWIW, it's custom that 'install*' targets copy files, not move them.
Ideally, 'make install' should not modify an up to date build tree at
all (however, even libtool breaks this rule sometimes).

FWIW2, if you believe modules are named *.so on all kinds of interesting
systems, nope.

Cheers,
Ralf