[ On Thursday, February 10, 2005 at 22:20:49 (-0500), Todd Vierling wrote: ]
> Subject: Re: gtk2 built twice?
>
> I thought so too, but there's a real problem here:  ensuring that libraries
> do not accidentally touch installed previous versions of the same libraries.

Hmm, yeah, well if the only "solution" to that problem is to always
relink on install then I would suggest it's not libtool's problem to
fix.  Something far more fundamental is broken, perhaps in the design,
but certainly in the assumptions of the developers who assume they can
bundle builds of libraries and the programs that use them into the same
build and then also test those things before installing anything.

It was a very bad idea to start down this path of trying to support this
kludge in the first place and having to do any relinking at install
time, let alone always doing relinking at install time, is just further
proof.

Good software hygiene can only be maintained if this kind of modular
development and code reuse attempts really are done with 100% black-box
ABI contracts.  Anyone who thinks otherwise deserves all the hairy
problems that result.

In any case as far as I can tell from the current documentation for
libtool this relinking during install is only ever supposed to happen in
the case I described (i.e. as per the description in the "Install mode"
info node).

-- 
						Greg A. Woods

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