[emboss-dev] Move to libtool 2.2.6a

[ajb at ebi.ac.uk]

Dear developers,

We would like to update the EMBOSS CVS source code from using libtool 1.5.x
to libtool 2.2.6a.

Libtool 2, in various versions, has been out now for well over a year.
Many current distributions, after having spent some time putting
it through its paces, have now adopted it e.g. Fedora, OpenSuSE,
Mandriva, cygwin, MacOSX Snow Leopard etc.

This puts us in the unenviable position in that whatever we do will
probably irritate some people. We can't be in the position,
though, where we have to eventually advise people to downgrade their
software.

1) If we stay with 1.5.x for now then more and more developers using
libtool 2.2.x are going to have to type (e.g.)

   autoreconf -fi

prior to the 'aclocal -I m4' stages.

2) If we move to 2.2.6 then developers on machines using 1.5.x
   will need to install libtool 2.2.6 somewhere (and usually
   install fresh versions of autoconf [2.63] and automake [1.11] to
   the same directory tree to avoid currently installed versions referencing
   the older libtool).

People on this list are developers and, by definition, obviously more than
capable of downloading 3 files from ftp.gnu.org and installing them. It
takes about 10 minutes. MacOSX is a bit different but new versions are
available from MacPorts.

So, the question is really whether anyone has any strong views for
or against a move to libtool 2.2.6 now, given that we will need to
get there in the near future?

Alan