Re: Splitting dependency_libs in *.la?

[Albert Chin]

On Mon, Oct 02, 2006 at 09:00:36PM +0200, Kurt Roeckx wrote:
> On Mon, Oct 02, 2006 at 01:51:58PM +0200, Axel Thimm wrote:
> > Can this be somehow dealt with within libtool? It would need to fork
> > the semantics of dependency_libs into static vs shared libs or
> > something similar. I guess the difficult part is identifying what
> > parts of dependency_libs are needed for a shared build against this
> > library.
> 
> Debian has a patch that sets link_all_deplibs to no.  This basicly
> doesn't use dependency_libs for shared linking.  Note that this causes
> various problems for which there are open bugs in the Debian bug
> tracking system.
> 
> Because of this, Debian is more and more moving from .la files to using
> pkg-config's .pc files, which contains the info we need, and also has
> cflags (-Is) in it.

If you add LDFLAGS="-Wl,--as-needed", then linking against
dependency_libs shouldn't matter. But, that only helps if you use a
recent version of GNU ld.

And, even for .pc files, it doesn't mean you get _only_ the libraries
you need. What if someone has "Requires: -lpng -lz" in a .pc file?
Then you have a dependency on libpng and libz, which is unnecessary as
libpng already depends on libz.

I don't see how libtool can intelligently decide the minimum set of
libraries needed to satisfy the link.

-- 
albert chin (address@hidden)