Re: Linking against indirect dependencies

[Bob Friesenhahn]

On Mon, 24 May 2004, Albert Chin wrote:
> > 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.

It is not an easy task to intuit which systems require the full 
linkage list and which will work properly with an abbreviated list. 
Even older Linux versions require the full linkage list (or several 
copies thereof!).

A further problem is that libtool doesn't reliably know if a static or 
shared library will be used by the system linker.  If it guesses wrong 
and a static library is used, then everything breaks since static 
libraries don't support dependencies.

Bob
======================================
Bob Friesenhahn
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http://www.simplesystems.org/users/bfriesen