libtool's goal is actually smooth over the fact that dynamic linking is hard at compile-time. It's not a good abstraction and must be deeply ingrained into you

libtool's goal is actually smooth over the fact that dynamic linking is hard at compile-time. It's not a good abstraction and must be deeply ingrained into your project because of this. I typically do not use libtool but rather have an autoconf macro [0] to determine how to interact with the linker. This has the disadvantage that each "./configure" invocation can only produce either static or shared archives, but not both (since the object files that make those up may require different compile flags). libtool's solution is to compile the object file both ways, but it does not really go well with the autoconf mechanism. I also have a different set of macros for managing the ABI [1], and I'm not sure how that's managed with libtool. [0] http://chiselapp.com/user/rkeene/repository/autoconf/artifact/00e2f95c1836c5e7 http://chiselapp.com/user/rkeene/repository/autoconf/artifac... [1] http://chiselapp.com/user/rkeene/repository/autoconf/artifact/b9d44e1a68b091e3 http://chiselapp.com/user/rkeene/repository/autoconf/artifac...