Re: using the static library after building the shared library...

[Bob Friesenhahn]

On Sat, 29 Jul 2006, Ed Hartnett wrote:
> Are other compilers the same in these respects? Do they generally use
> the shared library by default, and require some flags to use the
> static one?

Yes, this is the normal behavior for all modern systems I am aware of.

> The immediate result is that if I have the build and install shared
> libraries, I am going to break everyone's makefiles on that
> machine. :-(
>
> It's a shame that gcc didn't take the other approach, of using static
> libraries unless told to use the shared ones. That way, users could
> install the shared libraries on their machine and start to use them,
> without breaking all existing builds on that machine.

It is actually the behavior of the linker rather than GCC.  The reason 
why OS vendors chose this behavior is that less disk space is 
consumed, library code may be shared by many applications in RAM, 
host/kernal variances may be handled via libraries, and it is easy to 
update the library without breaking dependent applications. You will 
find that for many modern OSs, it is impossible to build a completely 
static application except for very simple cases like the 'cat' and 
'sh' programs.

Bob
======================================
Bob Friesenhahn
address@hidden, http://www.simplesystems.org/users/bfriesen/
GraphicsMagick Maintainer,    http://www.GraphicsMagick.org/