[Zlib-devel] Use autoconf for zlib?

[William A. Rowe, Jr.]

Mark Adler wrote:
> Thanks for the responses.
> 
> On Apr 11, 2006, at 4:39 PM, Cosmin Truta wrote:
> 
>>From a practical point of view, I'd say IIABDFI.
> 
> 
> The thing that I'm looking for an easy fix for are complaints about  
> shared library support or lack thereof on various setups, and the  
> inability to make a shared and static library at the same time.
> 
> It sounds like the GNU tools are not the easy fix.

For the platforms well-supported by libtool, they are easy.

Unfortunately, these are the platforms well supported by zlib already :)

Consider automake, autoconf and libtool three seperate packages.  There's
no doubt you might gain some small benefit from libtool; it also means that
for platforms that won't build with libtool, you are waiting for patches to
go upstream, as opposed to simply fixing the problem.

Diagnosing a problem burried within ld within libtool within autoconf is
far more trouble than diagnosing the issue currently.

Finally, I can picture absolutely no advantage to automake for zlib.

Consider what it is you want to accomplish; perhaps autoconf would help,
perhaps not.  But by the time you have the .m4 files to do things the way
you want, you'll probably discover you have more custom .m4 script than
you originally had in .sh script today.

Bill