Re: [RFC] Moving ltmain.sh and libtool.m4 into Automake

[Gary V. Vaughan]

Thanks to everyone for your feedback.  Much appreciated.

It seems that merging libtool into Automake would be an unpopular move all
around, with significant downsides for users, so I no longer plan to do
that... unless there is a still strong technical argument supporting it that
I've yet to hear.

On 17 Oct 2012, at 20:57, Bob Friesenhahn <address@hidden> wrote:
> On Wed, 17 Oct 2012, Gary V. Vaughan wrote:
>> 
>> Libtool is just (a complicated) compiler wrapper, to make building and
>> linking against libraries easy to specify... be that on the command
>> line with a direct libtool invocation, or from Makefile.am
>> specifications.  I'm considering splitting the current libtool project
>> in two:
>> 
>> 1. libltdl as a standalone runtime loader wrapper
> 
> If it helps any with decision making, on October 15th I unbundled libltdl 
> from GraphicsMagick, twelve years after I originally bundled it into 
> ImageMagick.  I decided to do this because I realized that the value added by 
> the bundling did not exceed the potential harm caused by the bundling.  
> Project configure and build times improved by removing libltdl.

It does help, and in fact your observations about all the linking and
duplication issues (which Thomas Tanner glossed over in the docs to be
"left as an exercise for the reader") crystalised my partly formed
ideas about the benefits of a split.  I do plan to split the two shortly
after the next libtool release.

> Creading a stand-alone libltdl package is a very good idea.

The separation will also make both packages much smaller and more manageable,
especially without all the contortions of trying to support all the different
ways of copying everything into the parent package that libltdl currently
supports.

Cheers,
-- 
Gary V. Vaughan (gary AT gnu DOT org)