rdieter@math.unl.edu (Rex Dieter) writes:

Had some spare cycles today, so thought I'd share my highly editorial take on libtool .la file with the world. Enjoy.

http://www.math.unl.edu/~rdieter1/libtool-archives-suck.html

It is not (only) *.la which sucks but the whole 'libtool' suite:

* when having a package which provides multiple libraries which are linked together, you could create an efficient

libfoo0 -> libfoo1 -> libfoo2 -> APP

dependency chain. With libtool you will always end with

libfoo0 --, libfoo0 ---> libfoo1 ---> APP libfoo0 ---> libfoo2 --' libfoo0 --> libfoo1 --'

* libtool reorders linker options, so that

| -Wl,--as-needed -lz -lfoo -lbar

becomes

| -lz -lfoo -lbar -Wl,--as-needed

rendering the '-Wl,--as-needed' effectless

* libtool is a bloaty shell script slowing down the build process significantly

* integration into automake makes 'make -s' useless

* it creates alwyas RPATHs in multilib environments (except you apply unofficial patches)

Enrico