Re: Several questions about libtool

2012-01-07 Thread Russ Allbery
Bob Friesenhahn writes: > On Sat, 7 Jan 2012, Russ Allbery wrote: >> Do you mean for detecting other libraries? Only for libraries without >> pkg-config support. > For detecting library features such as the availabilty of functions. Yes, it deals with that fine. Not that that's really on-topi

Re: Several questions about libtool

2012-01-07 Thread Bob Friesenhahn
On Sat, 7 Jan 2012, Russ Allbery wrote: Regardless, Autoconf's configure will still make subsequent decisions based on trial and error (by running the compiler and linker). Do you mean for detecting other libraries? Only for libraries without pkg-config support. You of course can't solve th

Re: Several questions about libtool

2012-01-07 Thread Russ Allbery
Bob Friesenhahn writes: > On Sat, 7 Jan 2012, Russ Allbery wrote: >> pkg-config is an excellent example of an alternative way of handling >> this that does not have this problem, and it includes Autoconf support. > What do you mean by "it includes Autoconf support". Do you mean that it > provid

Re: Several questions about libtool

2012-01-07 Thread Bob Friesenhahn
On Sat, 7 Jan 2012, Russ Allbery wrote: Bob Friesenhahn writes: I think that it is wrong to solely blame libtool for this state of affairs. In order for a project to work properly on non-ELF systems, or where installed shared libraries have abbreviated/truncated ELF implicit dependencies, or

Re: Several questions about libtool

2012-01-07 Thread Russ Allbery
Bob Friesenhahn writes: > I think that it is wrong to solely blame libtool for this state of > affairs. In order for a project to work properly on non-ELF systems, or > where installed shared libraries have abbreviated/truncated ELF implicit > dependencies, or where static libraries are involved

Re: Several questions about libtool

2012-01-07 Thread Bob Friesenhahn
On Sat, 7 Jan 2012, Russ Allbery wrote: I wouldn't argue for breaking Libtool's ability to handle such platforms, or for that matter old UNIX platforms that don't support transitive resolution of shared library dependencies. But I think Libtool needs some mechanism to correctly support platform

Re: Several questions about libtool

2012-01-07 Thread Russ Allbery
Peter Rosin writes: > Russ Allbery skrev 2012-01-07 03:13: >> Of which there are very few still in existence in terms of widespread >> use, since most systems now use ELF or (like Mac OS X) some other >> object format that doesn't require this. Solaris is definitely not one >> of them. I believ

Re: Several questions about libtool

2012-01-07 Thread Peter Rosin
Russ Allbery skrev 2012-01-07 03:13: > Bob Friesenhahn writes: >> Libtool's mode of operation works with static builds and on systems >> where all libraries have to be supplied at link time. > > Of which there are very few still in existence in terms of widespread use, > since most systems now us

Re: Several questions about libtool

2012-01-06 Thread Peter O'Gorman
On 01/06/2012 12:31 PM, Peter O'Gorman wrote: On 01/06/2012 11:21 AM, Stepan Kasal wrote: 1) .la file always contains the recursively evaluated list of libraries. While this is necessary for static linking and dumb dynamic linkers, it is an issue for dyn. linkers that can do recursive resolutio

Re: Several questions about libtool

2012-01-06 Thread Russ Allbery
Russ Allbery writes: > I don't believe this is correct. GNU/Linux does not add implicit > dependencies at link time; it only links with the libraries that you > explicitly list. ELF doesn't require that all symbols be resolved during > the link, only the symbols in the thing that you're linking

Re: Several questions about libtool

2012-01-06 Thread Russ Allbery
Bob Friesenhahn writes: > On Fri, 6 Jan 2012, Peter O'Gorman wrote: >> This is still an issue, libtool always adds all dependencies. Many >> packages assume this and don't explicitly add required dependencies to >> Makefile.am etc. I don't recall the arguments for not changing this >> when buildi

Re: Several questions about libtool

2012-01-06 Thread Robert Boehne
These questions are quite common, and what they really come down to is that many (or most) users want to solve a *different problem* than the one that Libtool was designed to solve. Libtool will deal with the platform specific vagaries of shared libraries in a uniform manner. It isn't designed to

Re: Several questions about libtool

2012-01-06 Thread Bob Friesenhahn
On Fri, 6 Jan 2012, Peter O'Gorman wrote: This is still an issue, libtool always adds all dependencies. Many packages assume this and don't explicitly add required dependencies to Makefile.am etc. I don't recall the arguments for not changing this when building shared. IIRC Scott tried to inc

Re: Several questions about libtool

2012-01-06 Thread Peter O'Gorman
On 01/06/2012 11:21 AM, Stepan Kasal wrote: 1) .la file always contains the recursively evaluated list of libraries. While this is necessary for static linking and dumb dynamic linkers, it is an issue for dyn. linkers that can do recursive resolution (which is the case on GNU/Linux distributions

Several questions about libtool

2012-01-06 Thread Stepan Kasal
Hello, I'm sad when I hear people rant about libtool, and I would like to know the answers to that rants. The following bugs were, as I supposed, known for years, but I may be wrong - perhaps they were resolved years ago or they were never filed. I would be very grateful if you could give me qui