Re: Validity of "fake" convenience library

[Dan Nicholson]

On Mon, Mar 3, 2008 at 6:37 PM, Peter O'Gorman <address@hidden> wrote:
> Dan Nicholson wrote:
>
>  > I was just looking through the pic code evaluation in libtool.m4 and
>  > not getting real excited about recreating that.
>
>  In xserver's configure.ac you can, somewhere after AC_PROG_LIBTOOL, put
>  something like:
>  CC_PIC_FLAG="$lt_prog_compiler_pic"
>  CXX_PIC_FLAG="$lt_prog_compiler_pic_CXX"
>  AC_SUBST([CC_PIC_FLAG])
>  AC_SUBST([CXX_PIC_FLAG])
>
>  Then in the Makefile.am that descends into the mesa build, you can set
>  these vars as arguments to make (I guess you already set CC etc this
>  way?), and use them to build the pic objects.

That's excellent, I had never thought of that. However, I may just
have to add a macro anyway since we need pic when building mesa
independently of Xorg. I may end up just borrowing some parts of
libtool.m4 and refactoring them. Or just using AC_PROG_LIBTOOL and
stripping out the values I need like above. What I have right now is
essentially "if gcc, add -fPIC, else fill in later...".

>  I am pretty sure that you can similarly avoid the need for a fake
>  convenience .la, but can not work it out without actually attempting a
>  build :)

How do you suppose that would work? Do I somehow tell libtool "this
other static library is pic, I'd like you to disassemble the objects
like a convenience library". If you actually want to try on
xserver/mesa, I can point you to the necessary repos and what packages
are necessary for the build.

Just to be sure, though: If I'm able to ensure that the static library
is pic, are there any other barriers to the fake .la approach? I just
want to make sure I know the limitations before proposing this.

--
Dan