Re: ordering optional libraries

[Marcus Brinkmann]

On Tue, Jun 03, 2003 at 10:31:02PM -0500, Robert Boehne wrote:
> Marcus,
> 
> If you have to depend on weak symbols, your platform list will
> be small enough that Libtool will be mostly a burden.
> I would advise you to craft your own make/configure magic instead.

Well, yeah.  Personally, I consider to be libtool the tool of choice for
building libraries, regardless of my target, and thus of course want it to
not be limited to the common denominator among all systems.  After all, as
the libtool manual states, libtool does not only encapsulates
platform-specific dependencies, but also the user interface.  For me often
the latter is much more important than the former.  If I can only use
libtool in the basic cases and have to use my own solution as soon as I am
writing only for the GNU system and start to use advanced features, then
from my perspective that is a deficit in libtool, in particular because it
is a GNU package itself.

In this particular case, you are right of course.  As I can not limit myself
to platforms which support libtool, and the weak symbol trick does not work
with static linking anyway, we thus can not leave it to the user of the
library to decide if it can rely on it to work automagically or not.  I guess
I have to build several versions of the library.

However, in general, I am really hoping that I never have to hand craft
my own shared library rules, and that if my target is only some particular
platforms known to support weak symbols, I hope that such an addition will
be considered.  I am willing to leave it at that for this time :)

Thanks,
Marcus

-- 
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Marcus Brinkmann              The Hurd http://www.gnu.org/software/hurd/
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