Re: libtool duplicate -l flags

[Bill Gribble <grib linuxdevel com>]

On Tue, 2001-11-27 at 20:38, James Henstridge wrote:
> I submitted a bug report for libtool about the duplicate -l flag 
> problem, and go the following reply:
>   http://mail.gnu.org/pipermail/bug-libtool/2001-November/002901.html
> 
> So libtool 1.5 won't have this problem.  I hope they put out a 1.4.x 
> release with the fix in though :)

Gnucash has resorted to shipping a patched version of ltmain.sh with our
sources and not running libtoolize in our autogen.  We got an ltmain.sh
from some KDE folks that's basically the one from libtool-1.4.2 but
filters the libs to remove duplicates. 

I understand the reasoning behind the libtool people's decision, but
like several other libtool design decisions in the past several releases
it is fundamentally broken.  It makes it appear that the libtool
maintainers are not seriously considering the consequences of their
decisions, and does not increase confidence in their ability to release
and support this critical piece of the toolchain.  As it is now, all
released versions of libtool have major problems for apps that use
dlopen aggressively.  This is a totally separate set of problems from
the failure to eliminate duplicate -l libraries, which basically makes
it impossible to compile apps with lots of lib dependencies. 

Going from a straight libtool 1.4.2 ltmain.sh to the dupe-removing
version cut the link time of the gnucash app from several hours to 5
seconds.  IMO there is no possible excuse good enough for this. 

b.g.