Re: Library dependencies

[Nicola Pero]

On Wed, 14 Mar 2001, Jonathan Gapen wrote:

>     With a little bit of manual intervention, I found I can create
> GNUstep executables without the numerous of library dependencies.  It's
> not hard:  When linking the GNUstep library, pass the normal linker
> arguments for all of the libraries which it depends upon.  Then, when
> linking the executable, DO NOT give any of those linker arguments.  For
> a command-line tool, "-lgnustep-base -lobjc" (and perhaps the thread
> library argument) is enough.  This generates an executable that only
> explicitly depends on libgnustep-base.so, libobjc.so, and libc.so,
> insulating it from any differences in the library set used by the
> GNUstep libraries.

I generally like this idea - seems a simplification of interdependencies.

But there is a little point we probably need to think about before doing
any change of this kind - some exceptional gnustep applications could need
to access the support libraries directly.  For example, exceptional
gnustep applications could need to use gnustep-gui and still in
exceptional cases access X directly.  For all of this to work, the X
library used by gnustep-gui and the X library used by the application need
to be the same.  The same applies, say, to libxml.  If you build an
application which both links with gnustep-base and uses libxml directly,
then you must use and link with the same libxml that is used in
gnustep-base.  This can only work easily if gnustep automatically passes
-I, -L, -l flags for all support libraries when compiling/linking - that
is, the old arrangement.  How can we make a rearrangement which is
flexible enough to meet both needs ?