I found libtool extremely painful to work with; it will hide your compiled libs in a hidden subdir, will wrap your compiled executable in a fscking shell script

I found libtool extremely painful to work with; it will hide your compiled libs in a hidden subdir, will wrap your compiled executable in a fscking shell script that then calls your real binary, it's unable to isolate a build against libs that may or may not be installed on your build system etc. Yet for all magic it does, libtool still doesn't solve the problem of building for a PREFIX (eg. /usr/local) in a temporary directory, and you need a chroot-jail or something for that. From the libtool manual ([1]): Currently it is not generally possible to install into a temporary staging area that contains needed third-party libraries that are not yet visible at their final location. So to build against a shared lib provided by another package, that other package has to be installed at the final destination already. I seriously considered going back to just static libraries at some point. I believe the build system of git does away with autotools alltogether, consisting of just a simple Makefile. Also, a link to phk's libtool rant seems apt here ([2]). [1]: https://www.gnu.org/software/libtool/manual/html_node/Install-mode.html https://www.gnu.org/software/libtool/manual/html_node/Instal... [2]: http://queue.acm.org/detail.cfm?id=2349257&ref=fullrss http://queue.acm.org/detail.cfm?id=2349257&ref=fullrss Edit: typo; make links work