Re: Relocatable .la files?

[Ralf Wildenhues]

Hello Benoit,

* Benoit Sigoure wrote on Mon, Dec 18, 2006 at 02:35:43PM CET:
> 
> what's the right why of distributing binary packages that are relocatable?

With shared libraries: in general, that is not possible portably.
Run paths encoded in libraries and programs are usually absolute,
and some systems lack the features needed for a relocation to
work well.

And so the Libtool library abstraction that was conceived many years
ago did not provide for relocatability even on systems that may allow
it otherwise.  You can use DESTDIR at 'make install' time, and then
move the package to the configured $prefix, but no general relocation.
It may work in some special cases, but e.g., certainly not with library
interdependencies.

(I'm not stating my opinion on this here, merely some data.)

> $ ../configure -C --prefix=`pwd`/_inst && make all install
> [...configuring liburbi-cpp...]
> === configuring in jpeg-6b (/Users/tsuna/svn/liburbi-cpp/_build/jpeg-6b)
> configure: running /bin/sh ../../jpeg-6b/configure
> --prefix=/Users/tsuna/svn/liburbi-cpp/_build/_inst 
> --cache-file=../config.cache --srcdir=../../jpeg-6b
> [...configuring jpeg-6b...]
> [...compiling jpeg-6b...]
> [...compiling liburbi-cpp...]
> [...installing...]
> $ cat _inst/lib/liburbi.la
> # Generated by ltmain.sh - GNU libtool 1.5.22 (1.1220.2.365 2005/12/18 
> 22:14:06)
> [...]
> # Libraries that this one depends upon.
> dependency_libs=' /usr/local/lib/libjpeg.la'

This, however, looks like a bug somewhere, iff libjpeg was built during
the build.  Please show the `libtool --mode=link' of the liburbi library
and eventual install/relink command lines and their output.  Please also
run the link command line manually, if it exists, with --debug added as
first argument, and post the output, so we can see what went wrong.
Please also post the configuration of the respective libtool script:
  ./libtool --config

You can pack large output with gzip or bzip2.

Thanks,
Ralf