Re: New libtool maintainer: request for feedback

[Zack Weinberg]

On Sun, Oct 24, 2021, at 4:33 PM, Alex Ameen wrote:
> Howdy,
>
> I just wanted to reach out and connect with y'all to introduce myself 
> and hopefully map out patches to `libtool' to improve integration with 
> `autoconf'.

Welcome aboard!  I am delighted to hear that libtool is being maintained again.

...
> Please feel free to reach out if you are aware of any headaches 
> `libtool' integration causes with `autoconf' development and I will be 
> more than happy to help - inline comments throughout `autoconf' refer to 
> a handful, but I imagine there are several others that are not 
> explicitly mentioned.

Off the top of my head:

It would be nice if libtoolize didn't have overlapping functionality with 
aclocal.  More specifically, the work currently done by libtoolize's 
func_install_pkgmacro_files should instead be done by aclocal (there may be 
other places that need changing as well, I only skimmed libtoolize.in just now).

If you can figure out a way to generate the 'libtool' script using only 
AC_SUBST operations, instead of relying on AC_CONFIG_COMMANDS, that will be 
substantially less fragile.

While this is not a problem _for autoconf_, it is my impression that the 
'libtool' script repeats a bunch of system-probing work, on each invocation, 
that could be moved to LT_INIT.  I would encourage you to pursue this change, 
both for performance and because it would make everything libtool knows about 
the build and host environment accessible to configure.ac code.

zw