For those who previously used libtool or currently use it you are likely aware that it has gone unmaintained for the last few years and as a result it has become somewhat painful for creating modern ELF shared objects. On the other hand it’s core design and interfaces have incredible potential if they could get a few updates.
With that in mind I’m happy to announce that I was recently approved to become the new maintainer of libtool and plan to expand its features for creating modern shared libraries.
I wanted to create a request for comment discussion for folks to submit suggestions for features they would like to see added.
Currently I plan to incorporate existing patch requests to avoid over-linking, as well as improve the usefulness of .la files incorporating native compatibility with pkg-config . Additionally I plan to add support for use of $ORIGIN in RPATH and RUNPATH , and handling for dependency cycles in shared objects ( which properly manage TLS optimizations ).
As a NixOS user myself, one of the first patches I will be applying is fixing hard coded references to /usr/bin/file in libtool which cause a large number of test failures on NixOS systems. On this same subject I suspect there are several other hard coded paths that I will be tracking down and patching. Another patch which I expect will be useful to NixOS/Nix ( and a number of other package-managers ) is making the installation of .la files optional since in their current state they cause a lot of headaches and arbitrary restrictions on moving libraries in the filesystem ( ultimately I hope to make these handle movement more flexibly, but for now I think it’s best to make their use optional ).
Aside from that I invite anyone to submit ideas.