Re: [PULL 00/13] Testing, build system and misc patches

[Peter Maydell]

On Mon, 6 Sept 2021 at 16:08, Paolo Bonzini <pbonzini@redhat.com> wrote:
>
> On 06/09/21 11:51, Thomas Huth wrote:
> > On 03/09/2021 18.49, Peter Maydell wrote:
> >> But I think there is an underlying meson bug here which that kind of
> >> use of an if is merely working around: if we ask for a static library
> >> it should not give us a dynamic library.
> >
> > Agreed. Actually, when I run configure with "--static --disable-system"
> > on my laptop, I'm also getting some warnings:
> >
> > WARNING: Static library 'z' not found for dependency 'zlib', may not be
> > statically linked
> > Run-time dependency zlib found: YES 1.2.11
> > Run-time dependency appleframeworks found: NO (tried framework)
> > Library rt found: YES
> > WARNING: Static library 'png16' not found for dependency 'libpng', may
> > not be statically linked
> > WARNING: Static library 'z' not found for dependency 'libpng', may not
> > be statically linked
> >
> > ... and linking then later fails while running "make".
> >
> > Paolo, could the behavior of meson be changed to fail already the
> > configuration step in this case instead of only printing a warning?
>
> The reason why this is just a warning is explained only in the code, and
> it's this:
>
>      # Library wasn't found, maybe we're looking in the wrong
>      # places or the library will be provided with LDFLAGS or
>      # LIBRARY_PATH from the environment (on macOS), and many
>      # other edge cases that we can't account for.
>      #
>      # Add all -L paths and use it as -lfoo
>
> In other words, Meson doesn't really know the library will be used for a
> statically-linked binary (as opposed to just not wanting a shared
> library for whatever reason).  So it looks for a .a file, and forces use
> of the a static library by passing a path to that file.  If it cannot
> find one, it warns.

Then Meson needs a feature so we can tell it "yes, we really did mean
that we want a static library, and only a static library will do".

thanks
-- PMM