Time-limited call for testers: single libtool patch

Ade Lovett ade at FreeBSD.org
Thu Feb 16 17:17:33 PST 2006


Folks,

At http://people.FreeBSD.org/~ade/single-libtool.diff.bz2 is a  
proposed patch that is aiming to go in before the freeze for 5.5/6.1,  
and is currently undergoing 6-exp build testing.

In order to cover a few more angles, I've been requested to make this  
patch available to a wider audience for testing.

The patch performs a major cleanup of the libtool environment within  
FreeBSD:

* devel/libtool13 is now dead
* devel/libtool15 now installs as /usr/local/bin/libtool etc.
* all but two FreeBSD-specific hacks have been removed from the ports  
version of libtool (which are in fact bugs within libtool itself),  
paving the way for the removal of devel/gnu-libtool, since "our"  
libtool is now stock.
* ports only rely on libtool as a build-time dependency if they  
absolutely need it (either because the port also uses automake/ 
autoconf etc., uses more advanced features of libtool itself, and so  
on) - the accepted convention for libtool-using code is to provide  
their own pre-packaged version of libtool within the source tarball  
itself, and for the Makefiles inside to use that, rather than an  
external version.

This brings the FreeBSD use of libtool into line with most (if not  
all) other platforms, most notably Linux and (possibly somewhat more  
importantly) NetBSD's pkgsrc/

This patch has already been subjected to a considerable amount of  
build testing, both on my own hardware, and more recently, on the  
dosirak and pointyhat build clusters (thanks, Kris), but we're  
looking for more, specifically on non-i386 and non-amd64 architectures.

A few notes.

1.  This patch is large, affecting 2,294 files and 1,375 ports.
2.  Whilst a portupgrade -a does work, testing should really be done  
on a clean system (or a clean chroot/jail), better still, in a ports  
tinderbox environment
3.  I need feedback no later than 2/19
4.  As a pre-emptive strike, comments regarding "installation of .la  
files is icky" will be gleefully ignored.  All other libtool-using  
platforms do it, we're the odd ones out here, and it's time to cut  
down on the (large) number of FreeBSD-specific autotools related issues.

Thanks,
	-aDe



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