Autotools

Summary

In this chapter, I outlined the basic rationale for shared libraries. As an exercise, we added a shared library to Jupiter that incorporates functionality from the convenience library we created earlier. We began with a more or less intuitive approach to incorporating a static library into a Libtool shared library, and in the process, discovered a more portable and correct way to do this using Libtool convenience libraries.

As with the other packages in the Autotools toolchain, Libtool gives you a lot of functionality and flexibility. But as you've probably noticed, with this degree of functionality and flexibility comes a price—complexity. The size of Jupiter's configuration script increased dramatically with the addition of Libtool, and ...