tech-pkg: Re: Libtool stuff

Subject: Re: Libtool stuff
To: Hubert Feyrer <feyrer@rfhs8012.fh-regensburg.de>
From: Todd Vierling <tv@pobox.com>
List: tech-pkg
Date: 07/23/1998 10:04:49

On 1998年7月23日, Hubert Feyrer wrote:
: If the LIBTOOL variable is not used elsewhere, I'd rather say to spell it
: out in these three cases to prevent having one more variable hanging
: around.
OK, sounds good. (Besides, I can foresee us needing to add one-off patches
on libtool in the future, so better to force use of the pkg libtool.)
: Hu, basically you're right and the .la files are really unneeded. 
: However, if 3rd party software insists on using it, alas, so be it.
: (I don't really care...!)
: 
: As far as I see KDE is right now the only one that insists on these files
: - how was this done before we switched over to libtool?
KDE, as well as a growing number of GNU autoconf pkgs, includes its own copy
of libtool in the source tarball. Normally, when you want to check for the
presence of a library using autoconf, it would use
"$CC -o conftest conftest.c -llibname" (actually expanded from an AC_ macro)
or something similar where conftest.c is just an empty main() function. 
KDE goes through a bass-ackwards way by forcibly checking for the .la files,
which can actually break cross-compilation. Sigh. So I added a switch to
our libtool to re-add the installation of the .la files.
-- 
-- Todd Vierling (Personal tv@pobox.com; Bus. todd_vierling@xn.xerox.com)