Libtool?

Various recent and not so recent problem reports got me thinking again
that it might be worth switching our shared library build system to
libtool. Among those are:

- Guesswork about which spellings of -rpath, -export-dynamic, -fpic etc.
work on a particular platform or compiler.

- Lack of information about which libraries libpq depends on.

- Makefile.shlib can only build one library per directory.

- pgxs is pretty ugly and inflexible because of the above.

- Static libraries built with -fpic, which is sometimes considered a
bug.

- Misbehavior with rpaths pointing the wrong way during the regression
tests and similar problems could maybe be tackled.

Considering that pretty much everyone uses libtool these days, I'm not
too worried about portability.

(And before anyone asks: No, libtool does not require automake.)

I think it may be worth trying out. Comments?

--
Peter Eisentraut
http://developer.postgresql.org/~petere/