rdieter(a)math.unl.edu (Rex Dieter) writes:
Had some spare cycles today, so thought I'd share my highly
editorial take
on libtool .la file with the world. Enjoy.
http://www.math.unl.edu/~rdieter1/libtool-archives-suck.html
It is not (only) *.la which sucks but the whole 'libtool' suite:
* when having a package which provides multiple libraries which are
linked together, you could create an efficient
libfoo0 -> libfoo1 -> libfoo2 -> APP
dependency chain. With libtool you will always end with
libfoo0 --,
libfoo0 ---> libfoo1 ---> APP
libfoo0 ---> libfoo2 --'
libfoo0 --> libfoo1 --'
* libtool reorders linker options, so that
| -Wl,--as-needed -lz -lfoo -lbar
becomes
| -lz -lfoo -lbar -Wl,--as-needed
rendering the '-Wl,--as-needed' effectless
* libtool is a bloaty shell script slowing down the build process
significantly
* integration into automake makes 'make -s' useless
* it creates alwyas RPATHs in multilib environments (except you apply
unofficial patches)
Enrico