gettext libintl.la dependency_libs problem

[Tim Mooney]

All-

I'm on the libtool list, but not the bug-gnu-gettext list.  I haven't
looked at this problem long enough to know with any certainty where the
bug is, but my guess is libtool.

Take a platform like alphaev56-dec-osf5.1 or mips-sgi-irix6.5.  Build
GNU libiconv 1.8, and install it somewhere, say /usr/local/gnu.  Now
build GNU gettext 0.11.5 to install under the same path.  Gettext's
configure should detect libiconv and use it.  The problem is, in
the `libintl.la' file that is generated for gettext, the dependency_libs
line ends up like:

# Libraries that this one depends upon.
dependency_libs=' -R/usr/local/gnu/lib -L/usr/local/gnu/lib 
/usr/local/gnu/lib/libiconv.la -lc'


Now say you build some package (for me it was glib-2.2.0) that depends on
gettext.  When you go to link the package on a platform like Tru64 or
IRIX, the link will fail because libtool passes the `-R/usr/local/gnu/lib'
to whatever is doing the linking on the platform in question (ld
generally).

Many vendor compilers and linkers don't understand `-R', so the link
bombs.

I tried rebuilding the configure machinery that comes with gettext 0.11.5
to use libtool 1.4.3 (currently it uses 1.4.2), and the results were the
same, so it's not something that was a bug in older libtool but is fixed
with recent libtool.

My initial impression is that either

1) `-R/some/path' should never be getting into the lib<whatever>.la file
in the first place

or

2) libtool should be translating -R when it sees it to whatever is
appropriate for the current compiler and/or linker, when libtool later
links something with `lib<whatever>.la'.


Tim
-- 
Tim Mooney                              address@hidden
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