RE: another darwin patch

[Howard Chu]

> -----Original Message-----
> From: address@hidden
> [mailto:address@hidden
>  Behalf Of Charles Wilson

> Peter O'Gorman wrote:
> > Changed the check_method to pass_all (we can link against
> static archives).
>
> Regardless of whether it is *possible* to build a shared library that
> depends on (external, non-convenience-lib) static archives, it's
> probably not a good idea to do so.  You'll eventually run into symbol
> name conflicts as dependent library heirarchies are released (on
> asynchronous schedules) over time.
>
> I thought there was a policy decision to disallow this behavior, in
> general.

I don't believe that libtool should dictate a particular policy here; you
have no idea how many ways it actually gets used. In OpenLDAP we have a
mixture of static and dynamic libraries. We only use libtool to build the
dynamic ones, but they can have dependencies on the static libs. If the
static library was not built by libtool, then it doesn't have an associated
convenience library. Symbol name conflicts aren't an issue here because these
static libraries are in OpenLDAP's private namespace.

If the idea is for libtool to be a general purpose tool, then it should allow
everything that the underlying platform allows. You can try do advise against
doing something stupid, but don't get in the way of developers who know what
they want it to do.

  -- Howard Chu
  Chief Architect, Symas Corp.       Director, Highland Sun
  http://www.symas.com               http://highlandsun.com/hyc
  Symas: Premier OpenSource Development and Support