What is Libtool? What does it have to do with GNOME?

Libtool is an important portability utility. It gives a common interface to the mechanics of building, debugging and maintaining static and dynamic libraries on most computer systems in use. It works in three phases, the libtoolize command adds libtool support to a source tree by adding the ltconfig script. This script, in turn, generates a system-specific script called libtool in the source tree. The libtool script is the part that actually gets all the work done.

Like Autoconf and Automake, if you are using CVS, you need Libtool installed on your system. If you use the tarballs, libtoolize as already been run, and ltconfig is self-contained, so you do not need Libtool to be installed. More information about libtool can be found at http://gnu.org/software/libtool/libtool.html