On 2004-11-15T17:19-0600, Bob Friesenhahn wrote: ) system incrementally. There is also the point that the libtool which ) comes with a Linux distribution has likely already been hacked to be ) more lenient. If FSF libtool becomes more lenient by default, then ) there likely little actual impact.
Just to address that last comment: Red Hat has shipped patch-free Autoconf since Red Hat Linux 8.0, patch-free Automake since Fedora Core 1, and will hopefully be shipping a patch-free Libtool in Fedora Core 4. We do not modify these tools to work more effectively on Linux at the expense of their support for other systems because, well, developers might end up using them! And shipping software based on them. And, if and when that software breaks, it would be the developer and/or the various @gnu.org lists that get to figure out why (we would have been long disconnected from the chain by that point). Time that could go into developing new features and fixing real bugs would be wasted, so we lose. (For that to make sense, keep in mind that, outside of the GNOME world, the autotools are used primarily at packaging time, not build time. Having a Linux-optimized Libtool installed on a Linux machine is not likely to offer any benefit to people building software from source, just people who are packaging software to distribute.) We also do not modify these tools to work more effectively on Linux without affecting other systems because, well, such changes should be made upstream! This change should be made here! (Or not at all.) (Retooling all of the software we ship to take advantage of custom modifications to the build scripts really bogs down our build roots (and can waste developer time, causing us to lose again). We primarily do it (retool) now to take advantage of our multilib-aware Libtool.) -- Daniel Reed <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> http://people.redhat.com/djr/ http://naim.n.ml.org/ The pursuit of pretty formulas and neat theorems can no doubt quickly degenerate into a silly vice, but so can the quest for austere generalities which are so very general indeed that they are incapable of application to any particular. -- Eric Temple Bell, Mathematician _______________________________________________ Libtool mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://lists.gnu.org/mailman/listinfo/libtool
