On Thu, 2005-04-21 at 01:17 -0300, Alexandre Oliva wrote: > On Apr 12, 2005, Alexander Dalloz <ad+lists@xxxxxxxxx> wrote: > > > Having gcc on your system you certainly want libtool too. > > Not really. libtool, as well as autoconf and automake, are designed > to not be necessary for people who build packages, only for people who > modify the package sources, using the tools to update the generated > files that are to be shipped in the package buildable tarball. > > Therefore, removing libtool is perfectly reasonable, unless you happen > to be developing a package whose source repository doesn't include > generated files, for example, or that might need libtoolize run for > whatever reason. > > I realize a number of spec files do run libtoolize, as well as > aclocal, autoconf, automake, autoheader, autoreconf, etc. I've long > considered this to be a bug, and recommend patching the sources to > obtain the desired change. That's what patches are for. With the > current approach, packages stop building at random because of updates > of autotools, and then people blame autotools, instead of blaming the > packager. ACK. > If people took the correct approach, we could even push autotools to > Extras. I can't think of any legitimate reason to BuildRequiring > them. ACK, but there is one practical reason: Vanilla libtool does not support RH's multiarch on ix86_64. To support them. RH has modified their libtool to accommodate RH's multiarch demands. All in all, this renders all autotool-based configurations, having been generated by non-RH-libtools to be non-applicable on Fedora-ix86_64 systems, and thus introduces a need to run libtoolize and friends (The actual culprit is RH's changes to libtool.m4 - This requires to run aclocal, and thereby triggers the "autoreconf" chain) Ralf
