On Fri, May 25, 2001 at 08:32:17PM -0500, Steve Langasek wrote: > I found the recent libtool discussion on the samba-technical mailing > list very enlightening with regards to libtool's strengths and > weaknesses. And I really think there are a lot of weaknesses still > that need to be ironed out before I can endorse its use for > Linux-PAM. I'm not a libtool expert, but I'm told that it doesn't really handle library dependencies correctly. (i.e., adding explicit dependencies in a library so that when you dynamically link with the library, other libraries which are needed are automatically pulled in). For example, apparently GNOME, which uses libtool, doesn't do any library dependencies at all, and applications simply link with all possible GNOME libraries. This works mostly ok for applications (modulo namespace polution), but it's a complete disaster for libraries that need to be pulled in via dlopen(), since you don't have the luxury of simply declaring every single library under creation to the linker. The person I was talking to claimed this was a fundamental limitation of libtool, that couldn't really be circumvented without extreme pain and sacrificing platform portability. I haven't looked at this myself, so I can't personally vouch for this, but this is somethign that folks should like at very carefully, since getting this right is critical for PAM modules. (For example, the pam krb5 module needs to be able to have explicit dependencies so that the appropriate krb5 shared libraries are also pulled in when the krb5 pam module is loaded.) - Ted
