Re: Several questions about libtool

[Russ Allbery]

Peter Rosin <address@hidden> writes:
> Russ Allbery skrev 2012-01-07 03:13:

>> Of which there are very few still in existence in terms of widespread
>> use, since most systems now use ELF or (like Mac OS X) some other
>> object format that doesn't require this.  Solaris is definitely not one
>> of them.  I believe you may still need this on such platforms as AIX or
>> HP-UX that use a much different object format, but I'm not at all
>> certain of that; it's been years since I've used them.

> You are somehow forgetting Windows, probably the most widespread system
> of them all.  On Windows, you have to specify all libraries at link time
> and Libtool helps with that.

Indeed, I did forget Windows.  (Although while it's the most widespread
system of them all, it's a small fraction of the platforms on which people
use Libtool on a day-to-day basis.)

I wouldn't argue for breaking Libtool's ability to handle such platforms,
or for that matter old UNIX platforms that don't support transitive
resolution of shared library dependencies.  But I think Libtool needs some
mechanism to correctly support platforms where adding spurious NEEDED ELF
metadata is wrong and causes serious issues for distributions.  The
pkg-config approach seems to work reasonably well in practice.

-- 
Russ Allbery (address@hidden)             <http://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/>