Re: libtool and mkoctfile

[John W. Eaton]

On  4-Nov-2009, Jaroslav Hajek wrote:

| If thanks to these changes Octave's code will become cleaner and more
| portable, then I suppose that justifies them well. I never knew of
| gnulib before, so I can't justify that. I hope it's no problem use
| libtool and gnulib with other compilers.

As far as I know, libtool and gnulib are not aimed only at GCC.

| One problem I see with gnulib is that it is C-centric rather than
| C++-centric.

What I'm looking for is something that will handle replacing the core
POSIX functions on systems that don't have them, or that have broken
versions.  Most often these days, that is Windows, isn't it?  And
these are relatively low-level functions defined with C language
interfaces.  So I don't see this as a problem.

| Have you also considered Boost? FSF recognizes the Boost software
| license as free and GPL compatible.
| Boost likewise provides portable I/O and memory facilities, special
| functions etc...
| Boost is extensively developed and maintained, and very portable. Some
| portions of Boost made it into the C++ standard, and some are planned
| in the future. Maybe Boost would be a better option for Octave?

I suppose Boost would be OK for higher level things.  But it doesn't
aim to provide replacements for readdir or strftime on systems that
lack them, does it?

jwe