Re: another 1.5 release

[Daniel Reed]

On 2004-12-03T17:18-0600, Bob Friesenhahn wrote:
) It is certainly much safer and wiser to make such changes to HEAD.
) It supports proving that the changes don't break for GCC users on
) other platforms without placing a stable release branch at risk.  The
) reason for stable release branches is so that minor releases may be
) made without requiring re-testing the software on all supported

Libtool 1.5.10 with .multilib2 (and .nopicfix2) passes all test suite checks
on Linux i386 and x86_64 (and ppc, ppc64, ia64, s390, and s390x). As the
changed behavior a) is isolated to the discovery of libraries on the link
line, b) is only activated when GCC is in use, and c) only makes Libtool
behave as GCC would have behaved if it were used directly (by causing
Libtool to *use* GCC directly), the impact to all environments should be
statistically identical to the impact on any one multilib environment or
non-multilib environment (for untested environments that are multilib or
non-multilib, respectively).

That is, if Libtool+multilib2 is able to find libraries in Linux/i386, it is
because GCC is able to find libraries in Linux/i386. If Libtool+multilib2 is
unable to find libraries in Solaris/i386, it is because GCC itself is unable
to find libraries in Solaris/i386. In this situation (where GCC itself is
unable to handle -lfoo), Libtool's original library-finding algorithms are
used to satisfy libtool ... -lfoo.

I do not believe the behavior is a potential danger. At worst, faults in my
implementation should be the only risk.


) I believe that we should adhere to Albert Chin's advice that compiler
) feature tests should be restricted to libtool.m4.

The check for GCC is done outside of the scope of the change; all that is
checked in the new code is whether -print-file-name works, which will pass
for all recent versions of GCC.

-- 
Daniel Reed <address@hidden>    http://people.redhat.com/djr/   
http://naim.n.ml.org/
It is a miracle that curiosity survives formal education. -- Albert
Einstein, Physicist