Forcing the linking language

[Norman Gray]

Greetings.

Is there any way of indicating to automake which language to use when 
linking a library?

I'm assembling a (shared) library using convenience libraries:

lib_LTLIBRARIES = libfoo.la
libfoo_la_SOURCES =
libfoo_la_LIBADD = stuff/libconvenience.la

Now, libconvenience.la is a convenience library of objects built from 
_Fortran_ sources.  This means that the libfoo shared library should be 
assembled using the F77 or FC languages (this matters on OSX: this 
situation requires libtool's Fortran magic, since the OSX linker has a 
big downer on common blocks, and needs to be told to chill out a bit).

However automake doesn't know this, so it tries to use gcc to link the 
library, which fails.  Is there any way of giving it a hint, here?

Using libfoo_la_LINK isn't the solution, since that would require me to 
copy the long LIBTOOL definition that automake generates (which I 
oughtn't to have to know about);  manually adding --tag=F77 to the 
libtool line works, but there's no way of inserting that from within 
Makefile.am without redefining LIBTOOL (again using internals).  
There's no mechanism that seems obvious from automake.in, though I 
confess I have only a fairly sketchy idea of how it is that 
handle_single_transform_list (yes?) determines the language to use for 
the link.

I've managed to get this to work by setting

libfoo_la_SOURCES = dummy.f

where dummy.f is a trivial Fortran routine.  That tells automake that 
Fortran is involved somewhere, and it consequently does The Right 
Thing.  But this seems like a bit of a hack.

There's nothing leaps out from the list archives.  Does anyone have any 
advice?

Best wishes,

Norman


--
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Norman Gray  :  Physics & Astronomy, Glasgow University, UK
http://www.astro.gla.ac.uk/users/norman/  :  www.starlink.ac.uk


--
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Norman Gray  :  Physics & Astronomy, Glasgow University, UK
http://www.astro.gla.ac.uk/users/norman/  :  www.starlink.ac.uk