Update: Some of the techniques used in Dolt have since gone into upstream libtool. The remainder of Dolt needs updating for current libtool and whitelisting for additional target architectures. The Dolt project still has potential as a minimal libtool replacement, but it needs a maintainer. Anyone interested in taking over maintenance of Dolt should contact the Dolt mailing list.

About Dolt

Dolt provides a drop-in replacement for libtool that significantly decreases compile times on the platforms it supports. Rather than the libtool approach of running a large script for every compile that repeatedly figures out how to build libraries on the platform, dolt figures out those details at configure time and writes out a minimal doltcompile script containing only the commands needed to build a library on the current platform.

If you use automake, autoconf, and libtool, then using dolt just requires two steps:

1. add DOLT after the call to LT_INIT, AC_PATH_LIBTOOL, or AM_PATH_LIBTOOL in your configure.ac or configure.in script, and
2. append dolt.m4 to your project's acinclude.m4.

For any platform Dolt does not support, it will transparently fall back to libtool.

Why the name "dolt"?

I started out by writing a simple script to run from the automake variable LTCOMPILE, so I called it doltcompile, for "do ltcompile". The alternate reading "dolt compile" led to the name "dolt".

Get Dolt

Dolt uses the Git version control system. You can obtain the most recent version of dolt directly from the Git repository with the command:

git clone git://anongit.freedesktop.org/git/dolt

You can also browse the Git repository via gitweb.

You can get the latest snapshot of dolt.m4 from http://gitweb.freedesktop.org/?p=dolt.git;a=blob_plain;hb=HEAD;f=dolt.m4.

Discuss Dolt

Discussion about dolt occurs on the dolt mailing list. You can browse the list archives at http://lists.freedesktop.org/archives/dolt/.