Re: Several questions about libtool

[Robert Boehne]

These questions are quite common, and what they really come down to is that many (or most) users want to solve a *different problem* than the one that Libtool was designed to solve.

Libtool will deal with the platform specific vagaries of shared libraries in a uniform manner.  It isn't designed to easily expose features of *some* specific shared library implementions, but attempts to support the largest common subset of features.
If you have a fairly simple packge that includes libraries, you may be able to build & run it on CygWin with no changes (for example), and that is what Libtool was designed to do.  

Some that you mention below could be dealt with by adding them as new features.

On Fri, Jan 6, 2012 at 12:31 PM, Peter O'Gorman <address@hidden> wrote:

On 01/06/2012 11:21 AM, Stepan Kasal wrote:

1) .la file always contains the recursively evaluated list of libraries.
While this is necessary for static linking and dumb dynamic linkers,
it is an issue for dyn. linkers that can do recursive resolution
(which is the case on GNU/Linux distributions for many years).
(I believe that the rule that forbids packing .la files to -dev and
-devel subpackages on Debian and Fedora (respectively), is there just
to work around this problem.)

This is still an issue, libtool always adds all dependencies. Many packages assume this and don't explicitly add required dependencies to Makefile.am etc. I don't recall the arguments for not changing this when building shared. IIRC Scott tried to include Debian's patch at some point. I'll look it up in the archives later.

Overlinking when using shared libraries is not a good thing, and Libtool could be modified to have a list of all dependencies for the static case, but when the platform supports it, it could also have a list with only the first level of dependencies.

2) People told me libtool is slow and shell has to parse huge script
just to find out that it has to call gcc twice, with and without
-fPIC.  Again, this is not about the general portability case, it is
a request for optimization on GNU/Linux platform, that they percepts
as one of the major customers of libtool.

Libtool is faster than it used to be, the shell does have to parse quite a bit of script, but compile mode has been moved as close to the beginning of the script as possible to reduce that time, and the number of forks has been reduced drastically for modern shells. I believe dash and ksh93 are faster than bash at running libtool. Last time I checked, libtool's compile mode wasn't significantly slower than using dolt (http://dolt.freedesktop.org/).

 This could be optimized even more, but it would be a considerable amount of work just to speed up compilation (Shouldn't we be spending more time designeing code instead of building it?).
 

3) Does it happen often in practice that a project builds both -fPIC
and non-pic objects, even though only one of them is going to be
used?  If yes, and if it is because of a mistake on package
maintainer's side, can something be done about it?  (warnings, changed
defaults, autodetection in automake)

Perhaps the default should be --enable-shared --disable-static? It's worth considering.

Peter

This is the "common subset" in action.  Some platforms can't make static archives from PIC objects, so to make static and shared libraries, each source file must be compiled twice.  Users can disable either one at configure time, so Libtool is already doing everything it possibly can to do what it should.  Changing the defaults would just cause a different group of users to complain ;)