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LIBLTDL: Combine the benefits of CONVENIENCE / INSTALLABLE modes?


From: Yury V. Zaytsev
Subject: LIBLTDL: Combine the benefits of CONVENIENCE / INSTALLABLE modes?
Date: Mon, 15 Aug 2011 20:19:37 +0200

Hello,

I'm sorry if my question would appear to be too naive to the seasoned
libtool / libltdl users / developers; I'm just getting started with it
(thanks to John Calcote for his amazing Autotools book of which I've
bought a copy and never ever regretted this decision!).

After reading both John's introduction and glancing through the old
Autobook it is still not clear to me, why there isn't a macro which
would combine the benefits of both convenience and installable modes.

As far as I understood in the installable mode, the resulting configure
script will try to find a system-wide libltdl, and if it can not be
found, configure will try to build and installable version from the
embedded sources.

In the convenience mode, to the contrary, the embedded sources will be
used to build a static version of libltdl to be linked directly into the
executable, but the problem here is that if the program will link to
another library that uses libltdl in a similar fashion, the combination
will fail.

So to me it looks like if the following schema would be ideal:

1. Look for a system-wide libltdl copy and development files, if it is
indeed available, then try to link to it.

2. If no system-wide libltdl copy is available, then use the bundled
sources to build libltdl as a convenience library.

I understand that it could be undesirable to make this the default
behavior in the convenience mode, but maybe if it's too much to
introduce yet another third mode, a switch can be added like

--with-external-ltdl

or something like that to force configure to try system wide or
explicitly specified ltdl first in the convenience mode before resorting
to building a static version?

This way as a package maintainer I would be able to force the software
to use libltdl provided by the distribution and on the other hand, as
the package author provide my users on weird platforms that do not have
system-wide libltdl with a simple way to build my software with no extra
effort from a self-sufficient package.

Is this functionality indeed missing, or I was unable to find it?

If it is missing, is it because of some reasons that I didn't consider
or simply because of the lack of manpower / demand for it?

Thanks!

-- 
Sincerely yours,
Yury V. Zaytsev





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