Subject: libtool 2.4.2: Several tests trigger spurious output on OS X due to conftest.dSYM dir

From: Max Horn <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 10 Jul 2012 13:06:34 +0200

Hi there,

there is a problem in libtool 2.4.2 that causes several libtool autoconf tests to generate spurious output on Mac OS X, like this:

[...]
checking for archiver @FILE support... rm: cannot remove `conftest.dSYM': Is a directory
no
checking for strip... strip
checking for ranlib... ranlib
checking command to parse /usr/bin/nm output from cc object... rm: cannot remove `conftest.dSYM': Is a directory
ok
[...]

It is well-known that the Mac OS X compilers generated "conftest.dSYM" directories with debug information under certain circumstances. See also this libtool discussion from 2007: <http://old.nabble.com/Mac-OS-X-Leopard-and-conftest.dSYM-directories-td13681269.html>

Now libtool already worked around this OS X behavior by changing instances

  rm -f conftest*

to

  rm -rf conftest*

However, it appears that three instances of this in libtool.m4 where overlooked or crept in at a later date. The attached patchs (one for 2.4.2, one for git) corrects that. Without this patch, the spurious autoconf output can lead to various issues; e.g. it causes hard test suite errors in automake 1.12.x.

Since this affects many, many projects out there using libtool, it would be nice if this could be fixed in a released version of libtool. 

Thanks,
Max