Re: Several questions about libtool

[Bob Friesenhahn]

On Sat, 7 Jan 2012, Russ Allbery wrote:

> Bob Friesenhahn <address@hidden> writes:
>
> > I think that it is wrong to solely blame libtool for this state of
> > affairs.  In order for a project to work properly on non-ELF systems, or
> > where installed shared libraries have abbreviated/truncated ELF implicit
> > dependencies, or where static libraries are involved, the project needs
> > to add all dependencies to LIBS during the configure run.
>
> pkg-config is an excellent example of an alternative way of handling this
> that does not have this problem, and it includes Autoconf support.

What do you mean by "it includes Autoconf support".  Do you mean that 
it provides an Autoconf macro which makes pkg-config easier to use?

Regardless, Autoconf's configure will still make subsequent decisions 
based on trial and error (by running the compiler and linker).

> One interesting possible solution to this problem would be to eliminate
> Libtool *.la files in favor of pkg-config or something similar, rather
> than continuing to maintain two different mechanisms for doing largely the
> same thing.

They may seem like they do the same thing but perhaps they do 20-30% 
of the same thing (e.g. dependency info).  The .la files used in the 
build tree are very much needed since it is unlikely that builds will 
work at all without them (and libtool needs them).

> > I do agree that a tool can help solve these issues.  The linker itself
> > is in the best position to know which library dependencies are really
> > needed and to skip those which are not.
>
> It turns out that this is harder than it looks.  --as-needed causes
> obscure failures in places where the dependency really is needed although
> the linker can't figure that out.

I suspected as much.

> The pkg-config solution allows the maintainer of the library to declare
> the necessary behavior for both cases: working transitive dependency
> resolution, and situations where this cannot be relied upon.  The build
> system then chooses based on the situation.

Pkg-config is optional software which only really works when it is 
properly cared for and fed correctly.  Autotools (as currently 
defined) can not depend on it.  However, we need to determine if there 
is some way that libtool can work better for modern ELF platforms 
using only shared libraries while still supporting portability 
requirements, and use with static libraries.

The obvious "solution" is that there should be a mode in which libtool 
does not apply any ".la" dependency libraries from an installed .la 
file unless they are known to be static libraries, or static libraries 
are otherwise involved.  The various .la files listed in 
dependency_libs would need to be inspected to see if a shared or 
static library would be used.  If any static library would be used, 
then all of the library dependencies would still need to be applied 
out of fear that the static library depends on a symbol in a shared 
library.

Since GNU/Linux disributions have taken the approach of stripping all 
.la files from the distribution, the above approach becomes more risky 
to implement.

Bob
--
Bob Friesenhahn
address@hidden, http://www.simplesystems.org/users/bfriesen/
GraphicsMagick Maintainer,    http://www.GraphicsMagick.org/