On Fri, Jun 22, 2007 at 03:37:10PM +0100, Dermot.McCluskey at sun.com wrote:
> Are you, like Keith, saying Don't Integrate. Or do you see any value in > integrating with some form of warning/disclaimer? I did not exactly say Don't Integrate (or is that how we now read messages encouraging rigour?). I suggested certain requirements I believe must be met prior to integration, then asked whether the cost of meeting those requirements is justified by the benefits provided by having libtool in the WOS. My personal belief is that libtool has outlived by a good 10 years any usefulness it may ever have had, but one could still assert that some subset of developers will insist on using it and will not develop on OpenSolaris-based operating systems if it is absent. That implies a benefit to its inclusion and opens the door to an assessment of those benefits against the costs. My frank assessment, having spent some time trying to find and fix bugs in the cut-and-pasted maze of shell horror that is libtool, is that meeting these requirements will take weeks or months of continuous effort. But your assessment is what I'm after here. > The NEWS file says: > * Fixed command line settings for non-GCC compilers, Solaris/64bit. > which seems to be your bug. Could be. But blithely assuming that this vague synopsis refers to that particular bug, or that others just as bad aren't lurking, is ridiculous without testing. The flip side to any possible value libtool has is that if we integrate it and it continues to work very badly on OpenSolaris systems, those same developers who might be more likely to give OpenSolaris a try as a development platform will have the same negative experiences we've all had with libtool and then conclude that our environment is broken and unusable. Worse, they may use it to create more software distributions that contain broken and unusable copies of libtool, spreading the heartburn to everyone who then tries to build and install their works. -- Keith M Wesolowski "Sir, we're surrounded!" FishWorks "Excellent; we can attack in any direction!"
