Re: ncurses-6.2-20200817: Error creating shared libraries on NetBSD 9.0

[Rajeev V. Pillai]

 On Friday, 21 August 2020, 01:18:54 GMT+5:30, Thomas Dickey <dickey@his.com> 
wrote: 

> NetBSD 9's ld manpage says this:
>
>     -shared
>      -Bshareable
>         Create a shared library.  This is currently only supported on ELF,
>         XCOFF and SunOS platforms.  On SunOS, the linker will automatically
>         create a shared library if the -e option is not used and there are
>        undefined symbols in the link.

I don't think this is a linker issue. The NetBSD ld(1) accepts ``-shared'' just 
fine and creates
a shared library as you would expect. The issue is that the compiler driver 
doesn't treat
``-Wl,-shared'' as equivalent to ``-shared''--it doesn't pass ``-shared'' to 
ld(1) at all with 
``-Wl,-shared''. I had a notion that both were the same when it came to 
creating shared
libraries. But, it seems not. *None* of the compilers I tried, even the new 
ones, did it. They
all needed ``-shared'' instead of ``-Wl,-shared'' to create shared libraries.

> If pkgsrc doesn't support that, it looks like a bug in pkgsrc.

I'm not using pkgsrc. I'm compiling ncurses from source as per the GNU style 
(./configure,
make, make install) using the standard /usr/bin/gcc compiler (which has been 
updated to
gcc (nb4 20200810) 7.5.0) in 9.0_STABLE.

Thanks,
RVP