On Wed, 14 Feb 2001, Andrew Morgan wrote: > David Lee wrote: > > Looking longer-term: Has the time come to consider using GNU libtool? > > What is libtool? What is it for? I'm a complete novice at it. Every OS has its own peculiar way of doing static and shared libraries, shared object, dynamically loadable objects etc. You'll recall that GNU "autoconf" was developed to handle things such as OS-variant "include" files, defines, library names etc. Similarly libtool seems to have been developed to handle the plethora of OS-variant library and dynamic object mechanisms. automake, autoconf and libtool can be used independently, but also seem to work well together to manage portability. Several GNU packages now seem to be based on libtool. (Apparently, I understand, libtool got off to a rocky start, or perhaps folk adopted it too hastily in its early days and got their fingers burnt, and so it has had some bad press in the past. But we are looking to the future...) There's a good book "GNU autoconf, automake and libtool" by Gary Vaughan, Ben Elliston, Tom Tromey and Ian Lance Taylor, published by New Riders, ISBN 1-57870-190-2. It describes not only each product, but also how they work together, complementing each other, to produce portable software. -- : David Lee I.T. Service : : Systems Programmer Computer Centre : : University of Durham : : http://www.dur.ac.uk/t.d.lee/ South Road : : Durham : : Phone: +44 191 374 2882 U.K. :
