Re: libtool on AIX - soname feature inconsistent?

[Nick Bowler]

On 2024-11-27 01:01, Ben Huntsman wrote:
> In particular, I noticed that if you add libtool to a project by
> calling LT_INIT, and then run ./configure with the
> --with-aix-soname=svr4, the .la files that get produced with the
> library_names='whatever.so.3 whatever.so', but if you call
> LT_INIT([aix-soname=svr4]) and then don't specify --with-aix-soname to
> ./configure, the .la files have library_names='whatever.a whatever.a"
> 
> It seems to me that --with-aix-soname=svr4 and
> LT_INIT([aix-soname=svr4]) should be identical, correct?  Is this a
> libtool bug, or is this a bug in the particular project leveraging
> libtool?  (OpenAFS, in this case).

Yes this looks like a libtool bug to me.

I notice that when aix-soname=svr4 is NOT passed to LT_INIT, if you look
in the generated configure script, you can find the following code in
the following order

  ### FIRST PART
  if test "${enable_shared+set} = set; then
  [...]
  else
    enable_shared=yes
  fi

  [...]

  ### SECOND PART
  case $host,$enable_shared in
  power*-*-aix[5-9]*,yes)
  *)
  esac
  
And in this case, when you run configure --with-aix-soname=svr4, you can
see the output line:

  checking which variant of shared library versioning to provide... svr4

But when I use LT_INIT([aix-soname=svr4]), for some reason the order of
these two parts in the configure script are reversed.  As a result, the
default value of enable_shared is not set before it is used, and the
output about shared library versioning is conspicuously missing.  This
probably causes the other strange behaviour as some variables are not
being set properly.

If you explicitly run ./configure --enable-shared it goes back to normal
(with svr4 versioning as expected), as this has the effect of setting
enable_shared=yes early.

Cheers,
  Nick