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GNU Libtool
Introduction
GNU libtool is a generic library support script. Libtool hides the complexity of using shared libraries behind a consistent, portable interface.
To use libtool, add the new generic library building commands to your Makefile, Makefile.in, or Makefile.am. See the documentation for details.
Availability
The latest official stable release is available via ftp from your nearest GNU mirror. Download instructions and a list of ftp mirror sites are here.
The latest official alpha release is available for testing from alpha.gnu.org or one of its mirrors.
Daily snapshots of the repository are available via ftp from ffii.org.
Anonymous CVS
The latest libtool development sources are available via anonymous CVS.
Use the following commands to check them out (just hit return when you are prompted for the password):
$ cvs -z3 -d :pserver:anoncvs@subversions.gnu.org:/home/cvs login
Password:
$ cvs -z3 -d :pserver:anoncvs@subversions.gnu.org:/home/cvs co libtool
You can also fetch the development sources from the mirror site at ffii.org, which is updated from the master repository hourly.
$ cvs -z3 -d :pserver:anoncvs@anoncvs.ffii.org:/var/cvs login
Password:
$ cvs -z3 -d :pserver:anoncvs@anoncvs.ffii.org:/var/cvs co libtool
Once you have the tree checked out, you can keep it up to date
by using cvs update. There are three interesting branches
right now, which you can check out by using the -r <tag>
switch to cvs co or cvs update:
| Tag | Details |
|---|---|
| HEAD | The main development trunk, working towards release 1.4 |
| branch-1-3 | The 1.3 release branch. Patch releases for 1.3.x come from here |
| multi-language-branch | Feature branch for development of the tags functionality to allow a single libtool script to simultaneously support several different compilers/languages. |
Make sure you have installed recent versions of GNU Autoconf and Automake, then run ./bootstrap in the newly-created libtool directory in order to regenerate the configure script and Makefile.in files.
The CVS version of GNU libtool often depends on some yet to be released versions of GNU Autoconf and Automake; those can be obtained via CVS from Cygnus' Sourceware.
You can now browse the cvs archive live from the subversions repository with cvsweb.
Resources
Online Documentation
For more information, read the libtool documentation.
You can read about various features that we hope to include in future versions of libtool.
Mailing Lists
Libtool has four mailing lists hosted at gnu.org. Archives of these lists are stored at http://mail.gnu.org/pipermail/:
- libtool@gnu.org is for discussion of libtool development, porting to new platforms, ideas for the future, general libtool usage or problems. New alpha and stable releases are announced here. Send an email to libtool-request@gnu.org with subscribe as the subject line if you want to join. Volume is typically low.
- libtool-patches@gnu.org is where the patches to the libtool repository are posted for peer review before being commited to CVS. Send an email to libtool-patches-request@gnu.org with subscribe as the subject line if you want to join. Volume is typically low, though individual messages can be quite large.
- libtool-commit@gnu.org is where summaries of changes commited to the CVS repository are automatically posted. If you wish to see these changes as they happen, send an email to libtool-commit-request@gnu.org with subscribe as the subject line. Volume is sporadic, but typically low.
- There is also a special list for reporting bugs, bug-libtool@gnu.org, to enable the developers to track submitted bug reports. If you think you have found a bug in libtool, then you should, in the first instance send as complete a report as possible to this list. Ideally, you should include the text you get by running config.guess, the text you see when you run configure, and if you can, a patch made with diff -u5 which fixes the problem. If you can send a small script, modelled after the scripts in the tests directory of the distribution which fails with the unpatched distribution, but passes with your patch applied we can add the test to the distribution to make sure the bug doesn't reappear.
You can find browsable archives of the bug-libtool, libtool and libtool-commits lists at www.geograwler.com.
Contributing
If you wish to contribute to libtool, please read the documentation on contributing.