Re: AM_GNU_GETTEXT(use-libtool) and Automake's "make distcheck"

[Bruno Haible]

Simon Josefsson writes:

> The reason I discovered the use-libtool switch was that libtool
> complained that linking with .a archives was non-portable, although I
> never encountered a platform were it was actually a problem (and I
> tried it on cygwin, AIX, HP-UX and more).

It is unportable to create a shared library with -l options that refer
to .a archives. If your package indeed creates a shared library, and
the shared library uses the gettext() function, it is actually better
if you link with the shared libintl.so. To do this, simply use
     AM_GNU_GETTEXT([external])
instead of
     AM_GNU_GETTEXT([use-libtool]).

If you don't create shared library then I don't understand what the
libtool warning is about.

Bruno