Re: libtool duplicate -l flags

[James Henstridge <james daa com au>]

Bill Gribble wrote:

> 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. 
If you feel strongly about this, the right place to direct your comments 
is the libtool mailing list or developers.  I would love to see the 
duplicate flag removal put back in (it was in the 1.4 beta series, but 
removed just before the 1.4 release).

James.

--
Email: james daa com au
WWW:   http://www.daa.com.au/~james/