Re: Moving creation of libtool/ltmain.sh to config.status

[Gary V . Vaughan]

On Friday 13 July 2001 11:05 pm, Tim Van Holder wrote:
> > > - during config.status, simply do ltmain.in->ltmain.sh (if needed) and
> > > libtool.in-> libtool.
> >
> > Please don't.  The plan is to eventually start using libtool for link
> > tests during configure.  Deferring its creation to config.status time
> > means we won't be able to do that.  Unless you're only talking about
> > the configuration script of the libtool package here.
>
> Ah - from what Gary had said previously, I thought he wanted libtool to
> be created by config.status.

I did say that, but I wasn't aware of any plans to perform configure time 
checks with libtool.
 
>  Trying to do that just for the libtool
> package would seem impractical, as it requires several changes to
> libtool.m4.  

I am still unconvinced though.  It is config.status job to generate files, 
and automake (and make) would work better if config.status performed the 
generation.

> So I'll just leave things as they are.
> I would definitely like to have ltmain.sh generated by configure directly
> though, rather than by calling make, as that can lead to all sorts of
> loops (where the Makefile tries to update itself and ends up calling
> config.status --recheck, which calls make, etc.).

This too would be improved by performing libtool generation in config.status, 
the way it works now is pretty much a horrible hack.  Autoconf-2.50 has lots 
of nice new machinery to make generation of project specific files in 
config.status easy to achieve.

I can see your point Alexandre, but I think it would be better for the GCC 
build to have a (yet to be invented) nasty libtool hack to perform compile 
time link tests, than to have a nasty hack in the distributed libtool.m4.

Does autoconf-2.50 or higher have a way to schedule macroised code to run in 
config.status, so that we could write a libtool.m4 macro to save configure 
time libtool script based link tests until after libtool has been built?

Cheers,
        Gary.
-- 
  ())_. Gary V. Vaughan     gary@(oranda.demon.co.uk|gnu.org)
  ( '/  Research Scientist  http://www.oranda.demon.co.uk       ,_())____
  / )=  GNU Hacker          http://www.gnu.org/software/libtool  \'      `&
`(_~)_  Tech' Author        http://sources.redhat.com/autobook   =`---d__/