cvs commit: ports/Mk bsd.autotools.mk

[Ade Lovett]

On Mar 14, 2006, at 05:10 , Dag-Erling Smørgrav wrote:
> Good!  Now explain to me what good it does to have them around on an
> ELF system.  What functionality do you gain from .la files?

1.  they provide a platform-independent method of indicating  
dependencies
2.  they're used by code that utilizes libltdl to dynamically bring  
in modules outside of the "normal" link-loader method.

But you already knew that.

> It used to be a breeze.  It is now considerably harder, because
> gnu-autoconf's aclocal can't find libtool.ac, so you can't build
> anything that uses libtool.

I don't see a libtool.ac anywhere within devel/{,gnu}auto{conf,make}*

The goal here is to provide the exact same autotools functionality  
(libtool, autoconf, automake) as is present on other systems, notably  
Linux and NetBSD pkgsrc.  The recent libtool conversion has proven  
itself to work (otherwise there wouldn't be very many packages for  
the upcoming 5.5/6.1 releases).  The next step is to work on similar  
functionality wrappers for the autoconf/automake ports.

I'm really not interested in, nor do I have the time for, religious  
arguments.  If you don't like the way that libtool works, and want to  
propose a better system, the libtool mailing list is --> way.  In  
addition, if you're interested in helping improve the autotools  
system on FreeBSD, continuing to make it work in a similar manner to  
other platforms, there's lots to do...

-aDe