15.5 Cheap tricks

Here are a few tricks that you can use 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 's%^\(macro_version=\).*$%\1@VERSION@%;
              s%^\(macro_revision=\).*$%\1@package_revision@%;
              /^# ltmain\.sh/q' /home/src/libtool/libtool > libtool
  trick$ echo '. /home/src/libtool/ltmain.in' >> libtool
  trick$ chmod +x libtool
  trick$ libtool --version
  ltmain.sh (GNU @PACKAGE@@TIMESTAMP@) @VERSION@
  
  Copyright (C) 2014 Free Software Foundation, Inc.
  This is free software; see the source for copying conditions.  There is NO
  warranty; not even for MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE.
  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.