Re: --whole-archive doesn't work on OSX

[Andrew Miller]

Peter O'Gorman wrote:
> On Aug 2, 2006, at 10:24 AM, Andrew Miller wrote:
>
> > Hi,
> >
> > I have just posted a bug regarding libtool on OSX to 
> > http://savannah.gnu.org/support/index.php?func=detailitem&item_id=105489
> >
> > I'm not sure if that is the right place to post bugs, so in case it 
> > isn't, here is the text of the report:
> >
> > This bug tested on:
> > Darwin bioeng21.bioeng.auckland.ac.nz 8.7.0 Darwin Kernel Version 
> > 8.7.0: Fri May 26 15:20:53 PDT 2006; 
> > root:xnu-792.6.76.obj~1/RELEASE_PPC Power Macintosh powerpc
> >
> > It seems that recent versions of libtool don't support the 
> > --whole-archive on MacOSX. This causes the --whole-archive flag to be 
> > passed to gcc (which seems to be silently ignored on OSX), resulting 
> > in a link which doesn't really contain the whole archive.
> > For example:
>
> --whole-archive is not a libtool flag, where do you see documentation 
> that states you can pass --whole-archive to libtool?
After looking into this, I couldn't find anywhere, so I guess it just 
ended up in my tree from before libtool was used.

However, the documentation seems to imply that the behaviour of 
whole-archive should happen on all platforms, for all convenience 
libraries.

e.g.
— Variable: *whole_archive_flag_spec*

   Compiler flag to generate shared objects from convenience archives.

BTW I found out that although the old behaviour results in compiler 
warnings on OSX, they still produce the correct result (otherwise you 
can end up missing symbols which are needed by libraries).

Best regards,
Andrew Miller