Hello Philip,
thanks for the reports.
* Philip Prindeville wrote on Sun, Jul 11, 2010 at 02:38:28AM CEST:
The problem is that a lot of projects that we use in turn use
libtool (and not always terribly up-to-date versions of it),
this is something I'm afraid you need to take up with the projects.
and
what seems to happen is that the relink stage uses -L/usr/lib by
default, even when cross-compiling.
This is a bug in libtool. I could argue about calling it a limitation,
but that doesn't really matter.
There's probably a really simple trick to getting this not to happen,
but it's not obvious to me. Also, it would be nice if libtool figured
out the need to do this on its own (i.e. figure out that it's
cross-compiling and that -Lxxx for any host libraries shouldn't be
included).
Can someone walk me through the workaround?
I'm not sure there is a general workaround. For some setups it helps to
(temporarily) remove the .la files of the libraries relinked against.
I don't really have the time to look into this right now (and I expect
it to be at least a little bigger project), but here's what you (and
others) can do to help: post small reproducible examples, ideally as
portable as possible, and ideally as XFAILing testsuite additions
against tests/destdir.at so that it is clear what it is that is to be
fixed.
If you are not at ease with Autotest, a small shell script that creates
the necessary files and invokes libtool in the way that exposes the
bug(s) is fine, too. It's just that IIRC, there were a lot more than
just one detail to get right here, some quite debatable because they
don't apply in all situations, and I think we should start by collecting
setups that we think ought to work.
One complication when writing tests for this is that tests shouldn't
mess with system directories like /usr/lib or /usr/local/lib but OTOH
libtool treats directories listed in sys_lib_search_path_spec and
sys_lib_dlsearch_path_spec special. It might be necessary to use a
munged libtool script (similar to tests/install.at and others) that
adds entries to these below the build tree so we can play with them.
(Of course the test then needs to ensure that the link editor and/or
runtime linker really searches these directories.)
These comments of course all hold for the --sysroot stuff as well, which
is in a similar category of issues.
Please note that nontrivial additions need copyright assignment (ping me
and I'll send you the form off-list).
If somebody has done the work of searching for proposed patches for
these issues (IIRC there are a couple floating around at least in some
distros) then posting links would be a good thing.
Thanks,
Ralf