Re: Sticky --disable-shared

[Brian Dessent]

Alessandro Vesely wrote:

> Why not? I can build a shared library linking it with a static one.
> The static library has to be compiled with -fPIC, of course. It will
> then be included in the shared one, without further runtime dependencies.

Well of course if you put PIC objects in a static archive you can do
that.  But that misses the point, because it's not a common thing to do
and the vast majority of static libs aren't built that way (and
certainly not by libtool.)  Moreover, libtool has no way of knowing
wheter a random archive that's outside of its control happens to contain
PIC objects, so it assumes it doesn't which is correct in the vast
majority of cases.

Now AFAIK libtool will create archives of PIC objects for convenience
libraries.  But these are never installed and always under the control
of libtool so it doesn't have to guess.

Brian