Re: LT_* equivalent to AC_CHECK_LIB?

[Tim Mooney]

In regard to: Re: LT_* equivalent to AC_CHECK_LIB?, Bob Friesenhahn said...:

> On Mon, 3 Jul 2006, Tim Mooney wrote:
> > I seem to recall discussion on this list in the past about why
> > distributions were doing that, but I don't recall what any of the reasons
> > were.  Has any work (perhaps as part of libtool 2.0) gone into addressing
> > the reason(s) why they were doing that?
>
> Operating systems with robust library dependency support don't like the 
> libraries explicitly specifying dependendies on libraries they are not 
> immediately dependent on.  Libtool has been specifying the full list of 
> dependencies to the linker, as it finds them in the .la files.

Ah yes, thanks for reminding me.  That makes sense -- I recall the message
about the pain that was going to happen for some distribution that was
going to up the soname major for freetype.

So to address this, libtool would need to

- know how the platform behaves regarding shared library dependencies
- in the case of static libraries, continue doing what it's already doing
- for shared libraries on platforms where the linker follows library
  dependencies
        - when creating a shared library, make sure that it's dependent
          libraries are recorded (however that's done for a particular
          platform, probably just linking) by the library when it's created.
        - when linking against a shared library of this type, detect which
          libraries are recorded as dependant for the shared library and
          leave those out of the list of dependency_libs for the shared
          library.

Is that about it?

Tim
--
Tim Mooney                              address@hidden
Information Technology Services         (701) 231-1076 (Voice)
Room 242-J6, IACC Building              (701) 231-8541 (Fax)
North Dakota State University, Fargo, ND 58105-5164