Libtool, oh libtool

September 2, 2008
...goes bye bye from edelib. At last :)

I never liked this tool, but I put it in use, thinking it would save me from messing with shared library creation. And it saved me, indeed, taking my full focus from shared libraries to libtool's own quirks.

For example, those command line options does not work. Or at least, does not do what their names suggests or what documentation said. And, after few tunings those things started to work, going to another computer with another libtool version, everything crashed so nicely yielding very sweet error reports that only libtool can give you.

Maybe I made a mistake using libtool directly, not via AC_PROG_LIBTOOL macro (that does some wizardy behind), but why program exists anyway if you can't use it directly? And in my case, there is no Makefiles nor Automake and AC_PROG_LIBTOOL will be happy if they are used (or you will have to play a little bit with $top_builddir).

Now, a third rewrite of SharedLibrary rule (in edelib Jamrule) finally starts to show some maturity behind ;). Symbolic links will be created, soname will be correctly set (actually not as libtool prescribes but it is easy to "fix" that) and in last commit, even .la files will be created. It is good to be libtool friendly, even if you don't use it.

The only thing left is to see how this will behave on other unix platforms (and other compilers) :P