Re: Favoring static linking at configure time

[Peter Rosin]

On Tue, Dec 04, 2007 at 07:36:36PM +0100, Benoit Sigoure wrote:
> On Dec 4, 2007, at 7:20 PM, Brian Dessent wrote:
> 
> ><GNU ld> <Solaris ld> <FreeBSD ld> <NetBSD ld> <Irix ld> <Looks  
> >like Tru64 does not>
> 
> Sounds great.  Unfortunately it doesn't seem to work with MSVC...   
> Which is one of the compilers I target.  :(

For the Microsoft linker, you have to manually keep track of if you
feed import libraries or "real" static libraries, there's no flag
to make link.exe select by itself. As Microsoft themselves typically
doesn't have any libraries that are available both as dlls and static
(do they?), there is no conflict (for them). MS would use foo.lib for
both an import lib and a static lib, where cygwin/mingw typically uses
foo.dll.a for the import lib and foo.a for the static lib.

My MSVC patches for libtool uses foo.lib for the import lib and
foo-<major_version>.lib for the static lib, on the assumption that you
generally want the import lib (the actual naming is only important
if you are consuming the library w/o libtool).

Cheers,
Peter