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Cheap tricks

Here are a few tricks that you can use in order to make maintainership easier:

• When people report bugs, ask them to use the `--config', `--debug', or `--features' flags, if you think they will help you. These flags are there to help you get information directly, rather than having to trust second-hand observation.
• Rather than reconfiguring libtool every time I make a change to ltmain.in, I keep a permanent libtool script in my PATH, which sources ltmain.in directly. The following steps describe how to create such a script, where /home/src/libtool is the directory containing the libtool source tree, /home/src/libtool/libtool is a libtool script that has been configured for your platform, and ~/bin is a directory in your PATH:

  trick$ cd ~/bin
  trick$ sed '/^# ltmain\.sh/q' /home/src/libtool/libtool > libtool
  trick$ echo '. /home/src/libtool/ltmain.in' >> libtool
  trick$ chmod +x libtool
  trick$ libtool --version
  ltmain.sh (GNU @PACKAGE@) @VERSION@@TIMESTAMP@
  trick$
  

The output of the final `libtool --version' command shows that the ltmain.in script is being used directly. Now, modify ~/bin/libtool or /home/src/libtool/ltmain.in directly in order to test new changes without having to rerun configure.

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