On Thu, 27 Jan 2005, Greg A. Woods wrote:

> > More is required on some platforms to get shlibs to work correctly than
> > simply twiddling compiler/linker options here and there.
>
> No kidding.  But it still doesn't require the mess that libtool grew into.
>
> I've built and maintained build systems that worked well with BSD(sun)
> style shared libraries, some other early hacks on other commercial
> unixes, and the old SysV shared libraries,

That's good, but...

> and it don't get much more diverse than that.

...this is completely wrong, and reflects your lack of diversity experience.
I work regularly with *eight* different platforms that have completely
orthogonal shlib creation processes and ABI compatibility issues, and
maintaining that manually would be a real man-hour consuming task.

Had you worked on more diverse environments, you would have known the
per-platform maintenance effort required to get shlibs right -- and hence,
you would have known why libtool fills that niche quite well.

-- 
-- Todd Vierling <tv@duh.org> <tv@pobox.com>