Re: building static on AIX

[Samuel Meder]

On Mon, 18 Mar 2002, Howard Chu wrote:

> > -----Original Message-----
> > From: address@hidden [mailto:address@hidden Behalf Of
> > Samuel Meder
> 
> > On Mon, 18 Mar 2002, Robert Boehne wrote:
> > 
> > > Under AIX, both shared and static libraries are
> > > named lib*.a, so by default we don't build static
> > > libraries, i.e. you get one or the other.  When the
> > > library is shared, the archvie file contains one
> > > member, the shared library.  This is how shared
> > > libraries are typically done under AIX, if you're having
> > > some problem with it, it isn't becuase it "just doesn't work".
> > 
> > I'm aware of the above, let me restate my email in a more verbose way.
> > 
> > The problem I was running into occured when I tried to use libtool
> > with the -static flag (which if I understand things correctly should
> > create static libs). This would cause empty libraries to be created
> > (all the object files got created correctly, but when libtool was
> > called in link mode something like 'ar cru libfoo.a' would happen (ie
> > no object files were specified on the ar line). 
> > To make static building work I had to supply the --disable-shared
> > option at configure time. My main complaint/suggestion concerning
> > the above was that I'd be nice if libtool either worked or returned a
> > reasonable error when the -static option is specified, but libtool
> > isn't configured to generate static libs by default (ie I don't like
> > the behavior where it looks like it's working, but in fact only
> > creates empty libraries).
> > 
> > Hope that explains it better
> 
> Something else to keep in mind; on AIX there is no reason to build
> static libraries since the linker can perform static links using shared
> objects as input. So for this case, "-static" should be a silent no-op
> and libtool should just continue to build a shared library. (Moreover,
> the AIX linker executes a lot faster with shared objects as input, and
> yes, it's smart enough to extract just the pieces it needs, it won't pull
> in the entire object file on a static link.)

The problem with that is that the linker by default will link the
object as a shared object. I don't really want to have to know that I
have to specify something like -bnso to be able to link some
supposedly static library as a static library.

/Sam