On Saturday, 12 November 2022 at 10:02:12 UTC, confuzzled wrote:
Why would I have to search for libcrypto, libminizip, libexpat,
and more that I haven't even figured out what library they are?
I thought those dependencies would already be linked into
libxlsxio_read.a which is a statically linked library.
This is called transitive dependencies.
For Unix systems linking a static library is not a linking per
se, it means putting object files (.o) into an archive (.a) using
[ar](https://linux.die.net/man/1/ar). So "libfoo.a" is just a set
of object files that don't know anything about their dependencies
and if you use something from libfoo.a, you might need to add
another library to you link line. Technically there are two
possible cases: (1) function that you use doesn't depend on
anything else, then you don't need to add anything to your link
line; and (2) function uses something from, say libbar.a - then
you have to add libbar.a to your link line.
Dynamic libraries (.so) are treated the same way as executables:
they are created by linker ([ld](https://linux.die.net/man/1/ld)
for example) and so they have to have all symbols resolved. This
means that if libfoo.so depends on libbar.a then the latter is
already baked in into the former so your don't need to specify it
when you link with libfoo.so. TBH I don't remember whether you
should add libbar.so (dynamic library) which is a dependency of
libfoo.so to your link line.
