[mapserver-dev] libtool usage

[Even Rouault]

> >>
> >> Maybe Frank or others involved in the GDAL libtool build support could
> >> share their experience?
>
> I would very much like to get the feedback of Frank or Even on this, yes.
>

I don't consider myself as an authoritative voice as far as build systems are
concerned and don't remember to have ever touched this part of GDAL. I almost
always use --without-libtool builds of GDAL, mainly because it is faster than a
libtool build (due to the absence of invocation of the libtool wrapper) ;-) But,
I don't recall any particular problem with libool builds of GDAL when I have
used them, but as I said, I almost never use them.

All I can tell is that my last expericence with libtool was yesterday, and not a
good one. I tried to build a svn head version of GEOS yesterday on a HPPA Debian
machine. I must say that this machine didn't have any of the autoconf, automake
and libtool packages installed in /usr/bin, so I had to build them manually from
sources. And I had an issue during the build of geos, due to a mix between
libtool 2.4 and libtool 2.4.2 (the one I built at hand). I finally managed to
solve it by reverting to libtool 2.4 and relaunching the ./autogen.sh
./configure process again.

I also somehow remember having problems with .la files generated by libtool that
had some bad content and that I had to manually edit. But I don't remember which
package it was. It is possible that it was in a context where mingw was
involved, not sure however.

Sorry for not being more precise...