Re: Linking against indirect dependencies

[Bob Friesenhahn]

On Mon, 24 May 2004, Albert Chin wrote:

> On Mon, May 24, 2004 at 08:19:00AM +0200, Szombathelyi Gy?rgy wrote:
> > I've just curious if is it possible _not_ to link a program/lib against
> > its indirect dependencies. I mean if libC is linked against libB and
> > libB is against libA then libtool will link libC against libA, which is
> > not neccessary in most situations (at least not on Linux, but I guess
> > not in most ELF platforms). What I've discovered is that libtool always
> > links against all the depencency_libs in the .la file. Here's a thread
> > about this issue in KDE:
> > http://lists.kde.org/?l=kde-core-devel&m=108534182408921&w=2
>
> dependency_libs doesn't contain just libraries. Maybe LDFLAGS as well,
> like -pthread. BTW, is it _really_ a problem to link against
> everything in dependency_libs? Indirectly, this is going to happen
> anyway even if libtool doesn't do this.

Of course the correct answer is that not linking against indirect 
dependencies is non-portable.  Certainly Microsoft Windows DLLs 
require full linkage, and I believe/suspect that AIX does as well.

Libtool always chooses the most portable approach and does not 
encourage developers to use non-portable platform-specific approaches. 
If libtool encouraged developers to use non-portable platform-specific 
techniques, then it would be dealing a blow to the goal of supporting 
portable software.

Bob
======================================
Bob Friesenhahn
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http://www.simplesystems.org/users/bfriesen