Right, libtool is the same - the people that wrote it weren't in a position to demand that all the UNIX-likes out there standardise their ld flags, so they routed around the problem instead.
>the people that wrote it weren't in a position to demand that all the UNIX-likes out there standardise their ld flags
Agree, but once Linux became the dominant Unix-like, the major Linux distros like Debian and Redhat were probably in a position to replace uses of libtool in upstreams with a distro-wide standard for ld flags.
They could, but what would be the advantage? Such patches couldn't be accepted by upstream, and the Debian/Redhat source packages are mostly only built by Debian/Redhat maintainers, so would the juice be worth the squeeze?
I don't claim to know what other upstream maintainers would've done, but if I had been one in the 1990s, and Debian and Redhat had agreed on a std for ld flags, I would've announced that libtool would be removed from my project in 24 months, so other Unix-likes should get on the train.
