4 ms·

libtool does serve a purpose: it causes plain 'make' to produce shell script wrappers as outputs, which is maybe kinda sorta vaguely useful when developing and

by amluto 3y ago

libtool does serve a purpose: it causes plain 'make' to produce shell script wrappers as outputs, which is maybe kinda sorta vaguely useful when developing and utterly and completely obnoxious if you want an actual ELF file. So you end up running 'make install' when you didn’t actually want to install or trying to remember how to find the actual ELF files. And you then wonder why 'make install' appears to be building things instead of just installing them, and you curse at libtool. In its slight defense, the magic incantation to convince gcc (or, yikes, pre-gcc cc or ld or…) to competently produce a DSO is both nontrivial and platform dependent. Last time I tried to get all the options right off the top of my head, sensible defaults were not a thing.

jonstewart 3y ago
Oh right, how could I forget that awful aspect of using libtool? I hate my life; maybe 2024 will be the year I find a decent build tool and the motivation to move projects to it. Contra your slight defense, is it really so hard to produce a good DSO these days? -fPIC is half the battle and a couple other weird flags for macOS/darwin will do you. Cross-compiling for Windows, sure, a few more flags — but you look them up once on stackoverflow, you have three options, and you're done.
- drewg123 3y ago
  100% this. Libtool is awful. In the early 2000s, I ripped libtool out of a product that built on Linux, Solaris, FreeBSD, Aix, Tru64, Mac OSX and Windows.
- amluto 3y ago
  > Contra your slight defense, is it really so hard to produce a good DSO these days? -fPIC is half the battle I did say “slight” for a reason :)
jcranmer 3y ago
I always thought that purpose of libtool was to incorrectly guess that it was smarter than the developer in figuring how to link files together. When I've been trying non-default link magic stuff (something like lto), trying to figure out how to get libtool to actually pass the damn necessary linker flags to the linker was damn near impossible.

by amluto 3y ago

jonstewart 3y ago

Oh right, how could I forget that awful aspect of using libtool? I hate my life; maybe 2024 will be the year I find a decent build tool and the motivation to move projects to it. Contra your slight defense, is it really so hard to produce a good DSO these days? -fPIC is half the battle and a couple other weird flags for macOS/darwin will do you. Cross-compiling for Windows, sure, a few more flags — but you look them up once on stackoverflow, you have three options, and you're done.

drewg123 3y ago
100% this. Libtool is awful. In the early 2000s, I ripped libtool out of a product that built on Linux, Solaris, FreeBSD, Aix, Tru64, Mac OSX and Windows.
amluto 3y ago
> Contra your slight defense, is it really so hard to produce a good DSO these days? -fPIC is half the battle I did say “slight” for a reason :)

jcranmer 3y ago

I always thought that purpose of libtool was to incorrectly guess that it was smarter than the developer in figuring how to link files together. When I've been trying non-default link magic stuff (something like lto), trying to figure out how to get libtool to actually pass the damn necessary linker flags to the linker was damn near impossible.