For those who don’t know, dolt is a wrapper and replacement for libtool on sane systems that don’t need it at all. It was created some years ago by Josh Triplett to overcome the slowness of libtool.

Nowadays libtool should be much faster so the necessity for dolt should not be as big anymore. However as can be seen here, it’s not true (at least in libtool > 2.4.2). Yeah, this seems a bug in libtool that should be fixed. However I don’t like it being any more complicated than it should.

After talking to Josh and to Luca Barbato (who maintains an updated version in github) it seemed a good idea to revive dolt on its original repository. Since this file is supposed to be integrated in each project’s m4 directory, there are several copies out there with different improvements. Now the upstream repository has an updated version that should work for any project — feel free to copy it to your repository, synchronizing with upstream. I don’t really expect much maintenance. Credit where it’s due: most of the missing commits came from the version maintained by Luca.

So, if you want to integrate it in your repository using autotools, it’s pretty simple, feel free to follow the README.md file.