In the near future: ******************** * Figure out why zsh echo builtin's removal of \ escapes is not detected by libtool's echo selector. * Fix the following bugs in libltdl: - Report dlerror() for dlclose and dlsym if available - Make sure that the dependency_libs of a dlpreopened module won't be loaded. * Check whether the version of libtool.m4 is compatible with ltconfig/ltmain.sh. Meanwhile, the recommended approach for developers using automake is to insert libtool.m4 in acinclude.m4. * We could have an option to hardcode paths into libraries, as well as binaries: `... -Wl,-soname -Wl,/tmp/libtest.so.0 ...'. This is not possible on all platforms, and is in part obviated by the ability of linking libtool libraries specified with -lname, but it might still be desirable. * Lists of exported symbols should be stored in the pseudo library so that the size of lt_preloaded_symbols can be reduced. * Have some option to tell libtool not to include -L flags that point into a certain tree in the dependence list of an installed library. For example: -L-$top_builddir would let one link with libtool libraries in sibling subdirectories within a project, using the -L notation, without getting builddir pathnames ever mentioned in .la files that get installed. * Eric Lemings <elemings@cyberia.lemings.com> writes: Because of a growing number of config scripts for packages in GNOME 1.2 (e.g. glib-config, xml-config, orbit-config. etc), development of GNOME 2.0 spawned a separate tool called pkg-config that allows all packages to use one tool rather than several different scripts to query compile flags, link flags, and other configuration data. The functionality of pkg-config seems to me to have a lot of overlap with the goals of libtool. I was wondering if anyone had considered adding an eighth mode to libtool that just queries the installed library for the same information that pkg-config provides. Since most packages that use pkg-config also use libtool, I think this would be a good way to reduce maintainer and developer dependencies. In the future: ************** * The definitions for AC_LTDL_SHLIBEXT, AC_LTDL_SHLIBPATH and AC_LTDL_SYSSEARCHPATH should not rely on the _LT_AC_LTCONFIG_HACK macro. This involves moving the code which sets the variables library_names_spec, shlibpath_var and sys_lib_dlsearch_path_spec from into a separate macro, and AC_REQUIRING the newly extracted macro in the respective ltdl.m4 macros. * Godmar Back writes: libltdl uses such stdio functions as fopen, fgets, feof, fclose, and others. These functions are not async-signal-safe. While this does not make libltdl unusable, it restricts its usefulness and puts an unnecessary burden on the user. As a remedy, I'd recommend to replace those functions with functions that POSIX says are async-signal-safe, such as open, read, close. This will require you to handle interrupted system calls and implement fgets, but the former isn't hard and there's plenty of implementations out from which you can steal the latter. I believe relying on async-signal-safe functions to the greatest extent possible would greatly improve libltdl's ability to be embedded in and used by other systems. * Arrange that EXEEXT suffixes are stripped from wrapper script names only when needed, and that a timestamp file or a wrapper program is created with the EXEEXT suffix, so that `make' doesn't build it every time. * Figure out how to use data items in dlls with win32. The difficult part is compiling each object which will be linked with an import lib differently than if it will be linked with a static lib. This will almost definitely require that automake pass some hints about linkage in to each object compilation line. * jeffdb@goodnet.com writes all you need to do for mutually dependant .dll's is to create an implib from a .def file so it appears that we might need to detect and handle mutual dependencies specially on win32 =(O| * If not cross-compiling, have the static flag test run the resulting binary to make sure everything works. * Implement full multi-language support. Currently, this is only for C++, but there are beginnings of this in the manual (Other Languages). This includes writing libtool not to be so dependent on the compiler used to configure it. We especially need this for C++ linking, for which libtool currently does not handle static constructors properly, even on operating systems that support them. ``Don't use static constructors'' is no longer a satisfactory answer. * Another form of convenience library is to have undocumented utility libraries, where only the shared version is installed. * We could use libtool object convenience libraries that resolve symbols to be included in a libtool archive. This would require some sort of -whole-archive option, as well. * Currently, convenience libraries (.al) are built from .lo objects, except when --disable-shared. When we can build both shared and static libraries, we should probably create a .al out of .lo objects and also a .a out of .o objects. The .al would only be used to create shared libraries, whereas the .a would be used for creating static libraries and programs. We could also explicitly support `empty' convenience libraries, that behave as macros that expand to a set of -Rs, -Ls and -ls switches. * We should include tests with convenience libraries and reloadable objects in the testsuite. * Try to find a work-around for -[all-]static and libltdl on platforms that will fail to find dlopening functions in this case. Maybe creating an alternate libltdl that provides only for dlpreopening, or creating an additional static library to provide dummy implementations of the functions that can't be linked statically. This could hardly be made completely transparent, though. * Need to finalize the documentation, and give a specification of `.la' files so that people can depend on their format. This would be a good thing to put before the maintainance notes. * Filenames containing shell meta-characters are not properly handled by libtool. Compiling a file named "a;b.c", for example, fails. * We could introduce a mechanism to allow for soname rewriting, to ease multi-libc support. Installers could specify a prefix, suffix or sed command to modify the soname, and libtool would create the corresponding link. This would allow for rebuilding a library with the same version number, but depending on different versions of libc, for example. In the future, we might even have an option to encode the sonames of all dependencies of a library into its soname. * The current implementation of libltdl in a subdirectory doesn't work properly with AC_CONFIG_AUX_DIR using projects. Things to think about: ********************** * Talk with RMS about his so-called `automatic package generation tool.' This is probably what Thomas has been murmuring about for the Hurd. We'll need to integrate package-supplied programs such as libtool into that scheme, since it manages some of the preinstall and postinstall commands, but isn't installed itself. Probably, things like libtool should be distributed as part of such a binary package. * Maybe implement full support for other orthogonal library types (libhello_g, libhello_p, 64 vs 32-bit ABI's, etc). Make these types configurable. * Perhaps the iuse of libltdl could be made cleaner by allowing registration of hook functions to call at various points. This would hopefully free the user from having to maintain a parallel module list with user data. This would likely involve being able to carry additional per user module data in the lt_dlmodule structure -- perhaps in the form of an associative array keyed by user name?