On Thu, 23 Jul 1998, Hubert Feyrer wrote:

: If the LIBTOOL variable is not used elsewhere, I'd rather say to spell it
: out in these three cases to prevent having one more variable hanging
: around.

OK, sounds good.  (Besides, I can foresee us needing to add one-off patches
on libtool in the future, so better to force use of the pkg libtool.)

: Hu, basically you're right and the .la files are really unneeded. 
: However, if 3rd party software insists on using it, alas, so be it.
: (I don't really care...!)
: 
: As far as I see KDE is right now the only one that insists on these files
: - how was this done before we switched over to libtool?

KDE, as well as a growing number of GNU autoconf pkgs, includes its own copy
of libtool in the source tarball.  Normally, when you want to check for the
presence of a library using autoconf, it would use
"$CC -o conftest conftest.c -llibname" (actually expanded from an AC_ macro)
or something similar where conftest.c is just an empty main() function.  

KDE goes through a bass-ackwards way by forcibly checking for the .la files,
which can actually break cross-compilation.  Sigh.  So I added a switch to
our libtool to re-add the installation of the .la files.

-- 
-- Todd Vierling (Personal tv@pobox.com; Bus. todd_vierling@xn.xerox.com)