Re: Using convenience libraries with non-recursive make

[Bob Friesenhahn]

On Wed, 22 Aug 2012, Del Merritt wrote:
> [Reponding on-list to what was Diego's private response to me; I hope he 
> doesn't mind.]
>
> I just finished an experiment with a single libfoo.a and all many-thousands 
> of sources for libfoo_a_SOURCES.  The compilation worked, but I got the 
> dreaded "make[1]: execvp: /bin/bash: Argument list too long" message when it 
> tried to do the "ar".  To the shell's credit, the command line appears to be 
> 134K bytes/characters in length, so I can understand why it would choke. 
> This doesn't bode well for the various "dist" targets.

In case it is not clear, when a libtool convenience library is used, 
all of the object files are extracted from the .a file and then the 
object files are passed to the linker.  If you were to successfully 
build the archive, the doom might just be postponed to the link step.

In a non-recursive build, it really should be better to simply 
encapsulate the collections of objects to use (equivalent to a 
convenience library) into make variables and then tell automake to use 
those when the dependent libraries or executables get built.

Libtool is supposed to take steps to limit command line length to the 
tested limits.  Apparently this did not work for you.

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