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(libtool.info)Postmortem


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A postmortem analysis of other implementations
==============================================

   In all fairness, each of the implementations that were examined do
the job that they were intended to do, for a number of different host
systems.  However, none of these solutions seem to function well as a
generalized, reusable component.

   Most were too complex to use (much less modify) without understanding
exactly what the implementation does, and they were generally not
documented.

   The main difficulty is that different vendors have different views of
what libraries are, and none of the packages which were examined seemed
to be confident enough to settle on a single paradigm that just _works_.

   Ideally, libtool would be a standard that would be implemented as
series of extensions and modifications to existing library systems to
make them work consistently.  However, it is not an easy task to
convince operating system developers to mend their evil ways, and
people want to build shared libraries right now, even on buggy, broken,
confused operating systems.

   For this reason, libtool was designed as an independent shell script.
It isolates the problems and inconsistencies in library building that
plague `Makefile' writers by wrapping the compiler suite on different
platforms with a consistent, powerful interface.

   With luck, libtool will be useful to and used by the GNU community,
and that the lessons that were learned in writing it will be taken up by
designers of future library systems.


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