[patch] releases.html

[Alexandre Oliva]

On Feb 14, 2001, "Zack Weinberg" <zackw@stanford.edu> wrote:

> Dynamic loading is implemented with a sensible C-level abstraction of
> the OS features

Just like libltdl?  Its basic API looks like:

/* Initialisation and finalisation functions for libltdl. */
extern	int	    lt_dlinit		LT_PARAMS((void));
extern	int	    lt_dlexit		LT_PARAMS((void));

/* Portable libltdl versions of the system dlopen() API. */
extern	lt_dlhandle lt_dlopen		LT_PARAMS((const char *filename));
extern	lt_ptr	    lt_dlsym		LT_PARAMS((lt_dlhandle handle,
						     const char *name));
extern	const char *lt_dlerror		LT_PARAMS((void));
extern	int	    lt_dlclose		LT_PARAMS((lt_dlhandle handle));

> not an overdesigned library which uses its own mysterious helper
> files (which tend not to get installed, so the system doesn't work
> at all).

It doesn't depend on the helper files at all.  It just uses them when
they're available.

> All this, and it manages to work on _more_ platforms than libtool
> does.

Are you sure?  On how many platforms does it work?  I don't know of
any platform to which libtool hasn't been ported on which it doesn't
work out of the box.  Platforms in which libtool doesn't work
correctly are those whose porter made mistakes.  If it knows nothing
about a platform, it still works correctly.  Try it.

-- 
Alexandre Oliva   Enjoy Guarana', see http://www.ic.unicamp.br/~oliva/
Red Hat GCC Developer                  aoliva@{cygnus.com, redhat.com}
CS PhD student at IC-Unicamp        oliva@{lsd.ic.unicamp.br, gnu.org}
Free Software Evangelist    *Please* write to mailing lists, not to me