[Proj] Indefinite delays with project library

[Gerald I. Evenden]

Among all the software development stuff available nothing, but nothing is 
more arcane and inscrutible than the automake, autoconf, libtool and, I might 
add, almost impossible to use.

I thought I had everything licked and managed to get a libproject.so which 
linked nicely to the geodesic program.  So I proceeded to add the projection 
software, do some cleanup on same and expand the Doxygen documentation.  The 
ad hoc mapping program was linked in nicely and I was happily making example 
plots.  Everything was going swimmingly.

Then OOPS.  I discovered that I was incorrectly using the versioning number 
system after a discussion with people on another list.  So I decided to start 
the series all over again and set it to 0:0:0.

Now the feces began to hit the fan.  Buried in this system there seems to be a 
Gnu-Linux God that must be appeased with some unknown sacrifices.  The damn 
system kept remembering the previous version number and messed with it and 
ignored any change I would attempt.  The only thing that seemed to work was 
to do a 'make maintainer-clean' and it finally did a 0.0.0 install.

Great, so I went to the applications like geodesic and the mapping programs to 
do a relink to the new installation.  Geodesic suddenly found that the 
configure could not find malloc and kept trying to link to xxx-malloc.  This 
was a fault of geodesic_cmd.h and I had to edit the file to make sure that 
the damn config.h was not included.  Then after I finally got each of the 
applications relinked the programs could not find the shared library!!!

Yes, yes, I had modified /etc/ld.so.conf to show /usr/local/lib which, of 
course, was proven by the previous success.

Another item that may be adversely affecting things is that I prelinked GSL 
and pthread libraries so applications would not have to worry about including 
them in their make's and/or worry about testing for them.

Right now everything is a hopeless f---king mess.  I am hoping that maybe a 
guru on the automake list will come up with a suggestion.  In my newly found 
spare time I can cry on this list.

People used to complain about the linker on the old IBM 360 system in the 60's 
but that was a piece of cake compared to today's monstrosity.

Anyway, the project library might be out in 2010 but don't hold your breath.

-- 
The whole religious complexion of the modern world is due
to the absence from Jerusalem of a lunatic asylum.
-- Havelock Ellis (1859-1939) British psychologist