[Freeciv-Dev] Re: request for --disable-sound

[Ben Webb <ben@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

On Tue, Jun 11, 2002 at 11:03:14PM +0200, Per I Mathisen wrote:
> I like the idea, but I really dislike libtool. Is there any way to avoid
> libtool hell?

        Hmm. I guess you could restrict the use of dynamic plugins to
systems which have gcc and dlopen(). The code I have at present only
works on systems with dlopen() - on systems without it the plugins are
statically linked in, as in current Freeciv CVS. (I did play with the
gmodule code in GLib, which is supposed to work with Windows DLLs and
also shared libraries on some other Unix-like systems that have dlopen()
equivalents, but my code randomly deadlocked when I did that, and I
could never figure out why. Using dlopen() directly didn't cause this
behaviour.) The problem with non-gcc systems is that you'd need
different bizarre command line arguments to build dynamic libraries,
which is what libtool handles for you. Restricting the code to gcc
builds is easy enough to do in the configure script. AFAIK, all systems
which have gcc and dlopen() build dynamic libraries in the same way.

libtool is really very nasty, but the only alternatives I've come across
are even worse. ;)

        Ben
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