Re: ltdl.m4 requires /usr/lib*/libltdl.la

[Ralf Wildenhues]

Hello Nathan,

* Nathan Phillip Brink wrote on Tue, Jan 05, 2010 at 08:10:28AM CET:
> Is anyone willing to confirm/acknowledge/reject this bug report?

It is a Libtool bug (or limitation, I don't care) that indirect shared
library dependencies are not supported well.  It is a Libtool design
decision from long ago, and in hindsight probably a bug more often than
a feature, that *.la files refer to other *.la files, and linking
against the former fails when the latter are (re)moved.

It is a user error to remove *.la files; in general, these are for above
reason, or for static linking or for libltdl usage (not only linking
against ltdl, but things like lt_dlopen("foo.la") as well).  I
understand why you do it, and doing it in directories searched by the
system linker is fairly benign on GNU/Linux systems, but that doesn't
mean it should be encouraged, nor can we guarantee that you can do it
for all libraries.

Hope that helps,

Cheers,
Ralf