17 July 2002
One of the annoying problems with
libtool is the way the
-export-symbols and -export-symbols-regex. The flags are supposed to
limit which symbols in the library are available to programs that
dynamically link to the library.
Unfortunately, the feature is not implemented correctly for many platforms. Rather than leaving symbols out of the dynamic symbol table, it just removes debugging information for the non-exported symbols (so not only does it not work, it also makes your code harder to debug ...).
So I put together a simple patch to fix the problem. At the moment, it only changes the behaviour under Linux as I can't verify whether it works correctly in the other cases (it probably does though). If anyone wants to try the patch, it is available at:
I wonder if libtool will make a new release any time soon?