Hello! I've received a bugreport that GNU Midnight Commander cannot be compiled statically on Gentoo Linux. The fix is to replace "-lglib-2.0" with "-lglib" in the command line. Midnight Commander doesn't use libtool, but glib 2.x does. glib also used pkg-config.
Following command is used to request static linking: ./configure LDFLAGS="-Wl,-static" The configure script blindly trusts the output of pkg-config. That's what pkg-config developers want us to do - the macro file pkg.m4 comes from pkg-config. To get the list of the libraries (in the form suitable for the compiler command line), following command is run: pkg-config --libs glib-2.0 The result is "-lglib-2.0". pkg-config doesn't know that static linking was requested. There is no option for that. So the output is the same for shared and static libraries. For this to work, libglib-2.0.a should be available to the linker. It exists on Debian unstable and Fedora Core 1, but not on Gentoo. It may surprise you, but the existence of libglib-2.0.a appears to be a workaround for a libtool bug. glib by itself doesn't create versioned static libraries. And that behavior comes from libtool. I'm not talking about "correct" versioning with "-version-info", but about "hard" versioning using the "-release" option. Let's compile CVS libtool with tests and run following in tests/demo: ./libtool --mode=link gcc -g -O2 -o libhello.la -rpath /usr/local/lib \ -no-undefined -release 5.6 hello.lo foo.lo -lm libhello-5.6.so is created in .libs, but libhello-5.6.a is not. Neither is it created during installation. The problem may be in pkg-config, but if so, I need very good arguments why libtool doesn't use versioning for static libraries. My question is - is the lack of versioning for static libraries a limitation of libtool or is a something that pkg-config should work around? I checked the archives and found that proposals to add versioning for static libraries were posted, but I could not find anything that would explain position of the libtool developers in this question. I don't want to add libtool support for GNU Midnight Commander just because it's linked against glib. If you think it's a good idea, I'd like to hear arguments. -- Regards, Pavel Roskin _______________________________________________ Libtool mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://mail.gnu.org/mailman/listinfo/libtool
