Re: libtool and mkoctfile

[John W. Eaton]

On  6-Nov-2009, Benjamin Lindner wrote:

| I am honestly not sure about mkoctfile as shell script 
| with libtool for windows.

I'm not sure about it either, which is why I asked whether it would
cause a lot of trouble to require a sh interpreter for this purpose.

Here's my current plan:

  * Use libtool and automake for building Octave.  This is
    non-negotiable at this point, because I want to use gnulib, and
    using automake and libtool seems to be pretty much a requirement
    for doing that.  I see a lot of benefit to using gnulib instead of
    our current oddball collection of replacement/portability
    functions grabbed from various sources at random points in time.

  * Leave the current configure hacks in place to set variables for
    mkoctfile.

  * We'll keep the mkoctfile script and program.  If anything, we'll
    eliminate the script and keep the program, so that we can avoid
    the problem of having them diverge from one another.

  * Eventually use libtool to replace the homegrown configure hacks.
    My idea is to hook into the libtool LT_INIT macro that is used in
    configure.ac to generate the libtool script and modify/extend it
    in some way so that it can also be used to generate mkoctfile.

The logic of choosing what compiler flags and methods for building
shared libraries is in the configure script magic generated by
LT_INIT, not the libtool shell script that it produces.

jwe