Thanks people; I understand (now) that libtool supports many targets, each with their own compilers. I guess that means the question becomes, why set -DPIC on targets that use gcc, where that compiler defines __PIC__ if it's generating PIC code (at least since gcc 2.8.1 to my knowledge - I don't know about earlier versions)?
Presumably stuff that needs to use conditional compilation for PIC/non-PIC code is compiler- and target-specific, so should use whatever support is provided in each case (where libtool could add a define if otherwise there's nothing available from which to decide on a given platform). In the case of gcc targets, I think '#ifdef __PIC__' should always be used, however there's a lot of code out there doing '#ifdef PIC' inside GCC-specific assembler blocks (for example). I'd like to be able to say to people who use '#ifdef PIC' for gcc-specific code (e.g. stuff inside an '#ifdef __GNUC__' block) that they should be using __PIC__, and get it fixed accordingly. Kevin _______________________________________________ http://lists.gnu.org/mailman/listinfo/libtool
