> When I write C code which I intend to be portable, I write against p9p, ...
I don't think this is fair to Gary's well-reasoned mail. He explicitly said libtool was solving the problem of providing a single consistent command line tool that handled the job of building a *shared library* on a variety of different systems. Plan9port mostly addresses the problem of providing a consistent C programming interface (library code) across a variety of different systems. There are the 9c and 9l scripts, but they are hardly a paragon of virtue and don't even bother trying to create shared libraries. That is, libtool says "you want to make shared libraries; I can help." Plan9port says "sorry, shared libraries are too hard; don't do that." Either approach could be valid depending on the context. A lot of people here on 9fans lump all GNU software together, but the different pieces can be very different, and there are good ones. To point some of those out: GNU awk is a nice piece of software. The core of GNU grep is very well written even if the surrounding utility has been embellished a bit too much. Groff is certainly less buggy and more capable than troff, though Heirloom troff probably beats them both. Russ
