Re: conditionally using libtool

[Ed Hartnett]

Russ Allbery <address@hidden> writes:

> Ralf Wildenhues <address@hidden> writes:
>> * Bob Rossi wrote on Sat, Apr 29, 2006 at 06:18:54PM CEST:
>
>>> OK, so is the only safe way to do this to have 2 configure.in scripts?
>>> One that uses AC_PROG_LIBTOOL and one that doesn't?
>
>> I don't see why that would be necessary.  Unless you need to avoid the
>> Automake adjustments it does for Libtool.
>
> Libtool is painfully, *painfully* slow, which is why use of it is
> conditional in INN.  The approach that we're using required figuring out
> what macros to call first, but it works well enough that I'll keep using
> it until someone comes up with something better.  It's certainly better
> than the speed hit from using libtool unconditionally.
>

Sorry, I don't follow here.

Firstly, I recently switched a large package to libtool, and it didn't
seem to slow down the build all that much. It's true that it makes the
build output harder to read, but that's no big deal.

Secondly, the build is something that the user does exactly one time,
so what difference does it make if it takes longer? It's a one-time
cost.

Naturally we all want things to be as fast as possible, but it seems
quite excessive to maintain two different build methods for a minor
gain in build speed in one of them. Buy a faster workstation instead,
it's a lot cheaper than extra configuration maintenance.

Ed

-- 
Ed Hartnett  -- address@hidden