Re: Get rid of libtool? [was Re: Makefile problems]

[Phil Edwards <phil@jaj.com>]

On Mon, Feb 25, 2002 at 01:04:58PM +1300, Bryce McKinlay wrote:
> 
> I must admit that, after a frustrating afternoon yesterday trying to 
> figure out silly libjava build problems when I really wanted to do 
> productive gcj hacking, I am sympathetic to RTH's recent suggestion that 
> we get rid of libtool (and automake?) and instead make sure that "gcc 
> -shared" knows how to build a shared library on all the platforms that 
> we care about.

I would fight the removal of automake.  It's been awfully darn handy for
maintaining libstdc++.  (Yes, the currently-required version has its problems
with subdirs, but the current automake release seems to have fixed those.)

Libtool is completely opaque to me.  I wouldn't fight its removal, but
I'm not pushing for it either.  I also never use it in any of my own
projects... [maintainer hat OFF] frankly, the platforms on which libtool
is supposed to be magically helpful are platforms which IMHO need to die,
and the sooner we abandon them the better.

Phil

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