Re: Linking against indirect dependencies

[Albert Chin]

On Mon, May 24, 2004 at 07:32:01PM -0500, Bob Friesenhahn wrote:
> On Mon, 24 May 2004, Albert Chin wrote:
> 
> >On Mon, May 24, 2004 at 08:19:00AM +0200, Szombathelyi Gy?rgy wrote:
> >>I've just curious if is it possible _not_ to link a program/lib against
> >>its indirect dependencies. I mean if libC is linked against libB and
> >>libB is against libA then libtool will link libC against libA, which is
> >>not neccessary in most situations (at least not on Linux, but I guess
> >>not in most ELF platforms). What I've discovered is that libtool always
> >>links against all the depencency_libs in the .la file. Here's a thread
> >>about this issue in KDE:
> >>http://lists.kde.org/?l=kde-core-devel&m=108534182408921&w=2
> >
> >dependency_libs doesn't contain just libraries. Maybe LDFLAGS as well,
> >like -pthread. BTW, is it _really_ a problem to link against
> >everything in dependency_libs? Indirectly, this is going to happen
> >anyway even if libtool doesn't do this.
> 
> Of course the correct answer is that not linking against indirect 
> dependencies is non-portable.  Certainly Microsoft Windows DLLs 
> require full linkage, and I believe/suspect that AIX does as well.

I don't see it that way. If a backend optimization can be done for a
specific platform, why not? If we lose nothing, I don't see why
libtool should not do it. The solution is still portable, as far as
libtool is concerned. Such a change wouldn't change any of the
cross-platform functionality libtool provides.

-- 
albert chin (address@hidden)