The person who invented the concept of shared libraries should be given a raise... and a bonus. The person who decided that shared library management and naming conventions should be left to the implementation should be flogged.

This opinion is the result of too much negative experience on my part with building shared libraries for multiple platforms without the aid of Libtool. The very existence of Libtool stands as a witness to the truth of this sentiment.

Libtool exists for one purpose only--to provide a standardized, abstract interface for developers desiring to create portable shared libraries. It abstracts both the shared library build process, and the programming interfaces used to dynamically load and access shared libraries at run time.

We should all be very grateful to David MacKenzie for having the foresight to--metaphorically speaking--stop and sharpen the ax. Otherwise we'd still be writing (copying) and maintaining long, complex hand-coded configure scripts today.

I'm going to make a rather broad and sweeping statement here: If you're writing free or open source software targeting Unix or Linux systems, then you should be using the GNU Autotools. I'm sure I sound a bit biased, but I'm not. And I shouldn't be, given the number of long nights I've spent working around what appeared to be shortcomings in the Autotools system. Normally, I would have been angry enough to toss the entire project out the window and write a good hand-coded makefile and configure script.

No one would argue that software auditing is not an important feature of mission critical applications. If a software based process is critical to the life of your company, then so is the security and access control surrounding resources managed by that software based process. Auditing is the way you track who did what to what and when it happened. Lately, however, the software industry has been lackadaisical at best regarding auditing. Off the shelf software developers either care about auditing, or they don’t.