Re: Libtool generating flags incompatible with nvcc

[Ralf Wildenhues]

Hello Mahesh,

* mahesh.mach wrote on Wed, Sep 02, 2009 at 01:00:14AM CEST:
> My friend and I are working on porting an existing library to NVIDIA CUDA.
> The library has a GNU Build System defined for its compilation and
> installation. We have suitably edited the configure.ac and Makefile.am files
> to compile with nvcc instead of gcc. Our aim is to generate a shared
> library.We call

> But during the make step, flags such as -Wl,-soname ; --whole-archive and
> --no-whole-archive are passed to the linker which is nvcc again, and these
> flags are not recognized by it and generation of the shared library fails.

We need a port of Libtool to nvcc.  That means, editing libtool.m4 and
possibly other files, to detect nvcc and set the correct flags for it.
Is it a GCC derivative?  Does it define __GNUC__?  What flags are used
for shared library creation, what flags for hard-coding of run paths?
Can you point to its documentation?

Would you be willing to help with such a port (it would require
downloading the Libtool sources, building it, trying out proposed
patches and running the testsuites a few times with it) or know somebody
who could?

If yes: the bug-libtool at gnu.org list is the right one to have this
discussion on.  Please direct followups there.  Thanks.

> On further inspection, we found that these flags are passed from libtool.sh
> which is autogenerated by config.status which in turn depends on
> configure.ac

The 'libtool' script stores these flags, right.  You can edit it to
temporarily override flags.  However, then they will be lost the next
time config.status is run.  The flags are set in the configure script.
That in turn is generated from the macros in the libtool.m4 file (and a
few other ones) that need to be edited in order to fix things.

Hope that helps.

Cheers,
Ralf