Obsoleting LT_SCOPE

[Gary V. Vaughan]

Hi Chuck,

I note that no other GNU projects that I'm aware of jump through all the
__declspec hoops that the libltdl API tries to provide through LT_SCOPE.
Is any of this stuff still required on any non-museum Windows compiler
that would break if I removed it?

Here's what I'm proposing to do for the upcoming libtool alpha release:

  1. Remove all traces of LT_SCOPE, and just use plain 'extern' in
     public header files.
  2. Remove the code for setting and passing LTDL_DLL_IMPORT.
  3. I can then safely eliminate $prefix/include/libltdl/lt_system.h,
     and simplify the public headers for libltdl considerably.

Do you forsee any issues on Windows with my doing that?

I'm almost certain that modern gcc and hence cygwin and variants will
continue to work correctly without LT_SCOPE, LTDL_DLL_IMPORT and friends,
but I have no clue whether vendor compilers that currently work (or at
least are supported and supposed to work) with the current release are
relying on LT_SCOPE magic from libltdl.

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