5.5.1 Invoking libtoolize ¶

The libtoolize program provides a standard way to add libtool support to your package. In the future, it may implement better usage checking, or other features to make libtool even easier to use.

The libtoolize program has the following synopsis:

libtoolize [option]...

and accepts the following options:

--copy

-c

Copy files from the libtool data directory rather than creating symlinks.

--debug

Dump a trace of shell script execution to standard output. This produces a lot of output, so you may wish to pipe it to less (or more) or redirect to a file.

--dry-run

-n

Don’t run any commands that modify the file system, just print them out.

--force

-f

Replace existing libtool files. By default, libtoolize won’t overwrite existing files.

--help

Display a help message and exit.

--ltdl [target-directory-name]

Install libltdl in the target-directory-name subdirectory of your package. Normally, the directory is extracted from the argument to LT_CONFIG_LTDL_DIR in configure.ac, though you can also specify a subdirectory name here if you are not using Autoconf for example. If libtoolize can’t determine the target directory, ‘libltdl’ is used as the default.

--no-warn

Normally, Libtoolize tries to diagnose use of deprecated libtool macros and other stylistic issues. If you are deliberately using outdated calling conventions, this option prevents Libtoolize from explaining how to update your project’s Libtool conventions.

--nonrecursive

If passed in conjunction with --ltdl, this option will cause the libltdl installed by ‘libtoolize’ to be set up for use with a non-recursive automake build. To make use of it, you will need to add the following to the Makefile.am of the parent project:

## libltdl/ltdl.mk appends to the following variables
## so we set them here before including it:
BUILT_SOURCES   =

AM_CPPFLAGS        =
AM_LDFLAGS         =

include_HEADERS    =
noinst_LTLIBRARIES =
lib_LTLIBRARIES   =
EXTRA_LTLIBRARIES  =

EXTRA_DIST   =

CLEANFILES   =
MOSTLYCLEANFILES   =

include libltdl/ltdl.mk

--quiet

-q

Work silently. ‘libtoolize --quiet’ is used by GNU Automake to add libtool files to your package if necessary.

--recursive

If passed in conjunction with --ltdl, this option will cause the libtoolize installed ‘libltdl’ to be set up for use with a recursive automake build. To make use of it, you will need to adjust the parent project’s configure.ac:

AC_CONFIG_FILES([libltdl/Makefile])

and Makefile.am:

SUBDIRS += libltdl

--subproject

If passed in conjunction with --ltdl, this option will cause the libtoolize installed ‘libltdl’ to be set up for independent configuration and compilation as a self-contained subproject. To make use of it, you should arrange for your build to call libltdl/configure, and then run make in the libltdl directory (or the subdirectory you put libltdl into). If your project uses Autoconf, you can use the supplied ‘LT_WITH_LTDL’ macro, or else call ‘AC_CONFIG_SUBDIRS’ directly.

Previous releases of ‘libltdl’ built exclusively in this mode, but now it is the default mode both for backwards compatibility and because, for example, it is suitable for use in projects that wish to use ‘libltdl’, but not use the Autotools for their own build process.

--verbose

-v

Work noisily! Give a blow by blow account of what libtoolize is doing.

--version

Print libtoolize version information and exit.

Sometimes it can be useful to pass options to libtoolize even though it is called by another program, such as autoreconf. A limited number of options are parsed from the environment variable LIBTOOLIZE_OPTIONS: currently --debug, --no-warn, --quiet and --verbose. Multiple options passed in LIBTOOLIZE_OPTIONS must be separated with a space, comma or a colon.

By default, a warning is issued for unknown options found in LIBTOOLIZE_OPTIONS unless the first such option is --no-warn. Where libtoolize has always quit on receipt of an unknown option at the command line, this and all previous releases of libtoolize will continue unabated whatever the content of LIBTOOLIZE_OPTIONS (modulo some possible warning messages).

trick$ LIBTOOLIZE_OPTIONS=--no-warn,--quiet autoreconf --install

If libtoolize detects an explicit call to AC_CONFIG_MACRO_DIRS (see The Autoconf Manual in The Autoconf Manual) in your configure.ac, it will put the Libtool macros in the specified directory.

In the future other Autotools will automatically check the contents of AC_CONFIG_MACRO_DIRS, but at the moment it is more portable to add the macro directory to ACLOCAL_AMFLAGS in Makefile.am, which is where the tools currently look. If libtoolize doesn’t see AC_CONFIG_MACRO_DIRS, it too will honour the first ‘-I’ argument in ACLOCAL_AMFLAGS when choosing a directory to store libtool configuration macros in. It is perfectly sensible to use both AC_CONFIG_MACRO_DIRS and ACLOCAL_AMFLAGS, as long as they are kept in synchronisation.

ACLOCAL_AMFLAGS = -I m4

When you bootstrap your project with aclocal, then you will need to explicitly pass the same macro directory with aclocal’s ‘-I’ flag:

trick$ aclocal -I m4

If libtoolize detects an explicit call to AC_CONFIG_AUX_DIR (see The Autoconf Manual in The Autoconf Manual) in your configure.ac, it will put the other support files in the specified directory. Otherwise they too end up in the project root directory.

Unless --no-warn is passed, libtoolize displays hints for adding libtool support to your package, as well.