Re: Building static-only or shared-only libraries on a per target basis

[Sander Niemeijer]

Hi,

Maybe I can clarify the reasons behind this patch a bit more, and also 
hopefully give an answer to your question.

Usually within a package you can have three situations for a library.

1) Only a static version is meaningful
In case you also have libraries of type 3) in your package, you do not 
want libtool to create a shared version of this library too. So for 
these libraries the -static option should be useful. Even if libtool 
was configured with --disable-static, libraries of type 1) will still 
be build. This behavior is already the case in the current version of 
libtool (although currently providing a -static option for the 
compilation mode also provides shared objects, which are completely 
useless if you also use the -static link mode option. Ralph's patch 
also fixes that issue).

2) Only a shared version is meaningful
This is the case (as I explained in my previous posts) when you need to 
build a module for an existing commercial application (that does not 
make use of ltdl functionality so static versions are indeed not 
useful). If you also have type 3) libraries in your package you do not 
want to have a static version build of this library. With the patch 
this is made possible by providing a -shared compile/link mode option. 
There is however a catch when your platform does not have shared 
library functionality (which actually means that the library of type 2) 
isn't meaningful for your platform anyway and should be disabled 
completely using conditionals in your makefile and some self provided 
configure option). So with Ralph's patch if you try to build a library 
with -shared and your platform does not support shared libraries or the 
user configured libtool with --disable-shared you will get a fatal 
error.

3) Both static and shared versions are meaningful
This is the most common case for libtool libraries. For these types of 
libraries you can globally set (with the 
--[enable/disable]-[shared/static] options) whether you want either the 
static version, the shared version, or both.

To come back to your question. Your library is of type 3). And as Ralph 
explained, if you want to have both a static version and a shared 
version you shouldn't provide a -static or -shared compile or link mode 
option and you should make sure that both enable_shared and 
enable_static are set to 'yes'.
If you still think that this patch would inhibit any functionality you 
want, please provide an example case where you might see problems.

Regards,
Sander

On maandag, aug 4, 2003, at 21:33 Europe/Amsterdam, Earnie Boyd wrote:

> Ralph Schleicher wrote:
> > Earnie Boyd <address@hidden> writes:
> > > But what if I want both?
> > Do nothing special, its the default libtool behavior.
> > If you want to ensure that both kinds of libraries are
> > built for a package, check for enable_shared=yes and
> > enable_static=yes at configure time.
>
> My question was relative to the offered patch.
>
> Earnie.
>
>
>
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