Re: how to turn off shared library notice in output of make install?

[Ralf Wildenhues]

[ Cc:ing bug-libtool ]

Hello Ed,

Thanks for the bug report.

* Ed Hartnett wrote on Wed, Sep 27, 2006 at 03:54:00PM CEST:
> I have shared libraries turned off by default, by having this in my
> configure.ac:
> 
> AM_DISABLE_SHARED

> When I build and do a make install, with or without shared libraries,
> I get the following notice in the output:
> 
> ----------------------------------------------------------------------
> Libraries have been installed in:
>    /shecky/n3_new/install/lib
> 
> If you ever happen to want to link against installed libraries
[...]
> 
> See any operating system documentation about shared libraries for
> more information, such as the ld(1) and ld.so(8) manual pages.
> ----------------------------------------------------------------------
> 
> This is all well and good for shared libraries, but can I somehow turn
> off this notice in the case of static libraries only?

Several comments: first, this comment is not written if libtool gets the
option --silent.  With the next Automake release, the user will be able
to use
  configure LIBTOOLFLAGS=--silent

or
  make LIBTOOLFLAGS=--silent

to avoid much of libtool's blabla, and the developer will be able to set
  AM_LIBTOOLFLAGS=--silent

in his Makefile.am.  But I agree that in the static case, the notice is
wrong.  It's not completely superfluous, but maybe only something like
this would suffice:

| ----------------------------------------------------------------------
| Libraries have been installed in:
|    /shecky/n3_new/install/lib
| 
| If you ever happen to want to link against installed libraries
| in a given directory, LIBDIR, you can use libtool, and specify
| the full pathname of the library, or use the `-LLIBDIR'
| flag during linking.
| ----------------------------------------------------------------------

Or would people prefer that nothing be output in this case?


Somewhat independently though, I also think that, when a package has
many directories and many makefiles from which libraries are installed,
then it would be neater to only output this blurb once, or at most once
per installation directory.  Or aggregated, as in:

| ----------------------------------------------------------------------
| Libraries have been installed in:
|    /shecky/n3_new/install/lib
|    /shecky/n3_new/install/lib64
|
| Modules have been installed in:
|    /shecky/n3_new/install/lib/foopkg/
[...]

I don't see a trivial way to do this in Automake/Libtool yet, but I
suppose it could be solved at the same time as the inter-makefile
library-installation-order issue is solved.

Cheers,
Ralf