Re: Regarding convenience libraries as aliases for objects

[Bob Friesenhahn]

On Fri, 25 May 2007, Ed Sweetman wrote:
> I really dont see why libtool generates .a files when they're not going to be 
> installed.  Since libtool knows the list of objects related to a ".a" lib, 
> the generation of the .a is a waste of disk space and time.  Is it possible

One reason to do this is because since libtool is based on shell 
scripts, it must still work within command line limits.  It is quite 
easy for even the list of object files in one library to exceed 
command line limits, even if the prefixing subdirectory path is not 
included.

> to have my makefile retrieve a list of the objects in a given libtool library 
> so that i can just use that variable in the LDADD of the target?  Or is there 
> a way to tell libtool to link a .la such that it directly links the .o's 
> associated with it directly to the executable and skips the intermediate and 
> useless generation of the .a file?

An avenue you can look at is the "non recursive make".  Automake 
supports this.  It is perhaps not for everyone, but it allows you to 
avoid the need for convenience libraries entirely and since make knows 
all of the dependencies, there is a minimum of rebuilding for each 
change.

Bob
======================================
Bob Friesenhahn
address@hidden, http://www.simplesystems.org/users/bfriesen/
GraphicsMagick Maintainer,    http://www.GraphicsMagick.org/