Hi Bob,
* Bob Friesenhahn wrote on Thu, Feb 02, 2006 at 05:39:02AM CET:
> On Wed, 1 Feb 2006, Albert Chin wrote:
> >>
> >>Good. GCC uses -B to mean something else. So -Bstatic is a
> >>linker-only option. It is likely useful to use something new which
> >>won't be confusing due the different meaning between GCC and ld.
True.
> >How about -static-only and -shared-only?
Hmm. If we were to invent new flags, I currently like
-force-static, -prefer-shared
best.
> >Note though that Ralf has -Bstatic defined as:
> > If @var{output-file} is a program, prefer linking statically
> > ^^^^^^
> >
> >This is not -Bstatic under Linux according to ld(1). If this is what
> >is intended, then -prefer-static is back :)
This is precisely and only because I wasn't sure whether we would find a
linker which allows to set the preferred more but not force it to.
And also, because we then need to define the semantics of linking
against a libtool library (*.la) that was created shared-only.
> There is something else we have not considered. How is all this going
> to mesh properly with autoconf configure?
This question is *not* new. `-static-libtool-libs' requires thought,
even `-static', because it has a different meaning for $CC than for
libtool. Look at GCC's libtool-ldflags script which I pointed to in
my first post in this thread.
We should think about whether:
- we add a similar script to the Libtool package, or
- detect more option forms in the libtool script itself, e.g.:
-Wl,-rpath
-Wl,-Bstatic
...
> I would love to be able to supply LDFLAGS options to configure and
> have them work appropriately within the configure script, and then
> work similarly for libtool.
Note that `-Wl,-Bstatic' will *not* be useful in LDFLAGS, but LIBS at
best, because of the ordering issues.
> If the options do not work in LDFLAGS,
> then it will be necessary to pass them explicitly via the Makefile.
>
> In this case
>
> -Wl,-Bstatic
>
> may work better even though it is more obtuse.
I don't see any reason against supporting both
-force-static and -Wl,-Bstatic
as two names for the same thing.
By the way, I'd like to fix ordering issues for `-Wl,'-given flags that
we don't understand, too; there have been several bug reports about
this.
Cheers,
Ralf
