[Guy Harris <guy@xxxxxxxxxx>]

> Unfortunately, automake's "--add-missing" option appears to be a bit
> unclear on what "missing" means - it copies in its own versions *even if
> there are already versions in the current directory*, so it cheerfully
> stomps on the ones checked out from the CVS tree.

It looks as if "libtoolize --copy --force" is what's overwriting them. 
I guess it considers "config.guess" and "config.sub" to be "libtool
files", so that "--force" cheerfully overwrites them.

It would be even more depressing if they *were*, in effect, "libtool
files", so that a given version of libtool works only with that
version's "config.guess" and "config.sub" files.

Why is libtool always such a huge source of pain? 1.3[.x] doesn't know
about Darwin, 1.4[.x] won't work because references to shell variables
aren't quoted in enough places, and 1.5 isn't released yet.

I really wish that, barring UNIX systems standardizing on *the same damn
command-line options* being used to generate shareable objects (which
probably won't happen until only the free UNIXes remain and the GNU
linker becomes the only linker for UNIX systems), something that was
less exotic and fragile than "libtool" existed as a wrapper for portably
building shareable objects (we don't need all its whizzo stuff for
providing wrappers for portably *loading* shareable objects; GLib does
that for us already).