Re: --whole-archive doesn't work on OSX

[Peter O'Gorman]

On Aug 14, 2006, at 11:26 PM, Andrew Miller wrote:

> Peter O'Gorman wrote:
> > On Aug 3, 2006, at 10:01 AM, Andrew Miller wrote:
> >
> > > ...
> > > However, the documentation seems to imply that the behaviour of  
> > > whole-archive should happen on all platforms, for all convenience  
> > > libraries.
> > >
> > > e.g.
> > > — Variable: *whole_archive_flag_spec*
> > >
> > >    Compiler flag to generate shared objects from convenience  
> > > archives.
> >
> > If whole_archive_flag_spec is empty, as it is on darwin for more  
> > recent versions of libtool then the convenience archive will be  
> > unpacked using lipo/ar and the objects will be added to the link  
> > line.
> I haven't been able to reproduce this behaviour when building  
> binaries for either libtool-1.5.22 or current CVS libtool (although  
> it does unpack the archive when building installable libraries from  
> convenience libraries).

For binaries, convenience archives are treated as normal libraries  
and are linked as normal, when building shared libraries, they are  
extracted, as you note.

Whether this is in itself a bug is debatable, and quite likely has  
already been debated on this, or the general libtool list. I suggest  
that you stop using convenience archives in this case and use  
ordinary objects instead. I believe, but haven't tried, using the - 
dlopen flag to point to the libraries that the executable will dlopen  
will also cause the required symbols to be included in the executable  
(because they will be referenced in the generated object containing  
the libraries symbols).

Hope this helps,
Peter