Re: getting wrong entries from gnulib

[Colin Watson]

On Wed, May 31, 2023 at 09:28:58AM -0700, Mike Fulton wrote:
> Indeed I am. I didn't realize that wasn't supported.
> 
> I was able to get it to work by deleting the reallocarray.o from the
> libpipeline.a archive.

I have absolutely no idea what effects that sort of hacking will have.
I'd strongly recommend against shipping the result to anyone.

> Are there known problems (other than the issue I just described) that
> prevent static binding
> or is it just untested?

It's not just a matter of being untested.  Since both libpipeline and
man-db rely on functions provided by gnulib with overlapping names (not
to mention some helper functions that are in both libpipeline and man-db
and that also share names), and since there's no guarantee that gnulib
is at the same commit across both projects or that it's built with
exactly the same options, the ability to control symbol visibility at
link time is required.

I don't know your platform, but my understanding is that the ability to
control symbol visibility generally goes along with dynamic linking;
static linking is too crude to allow for this.  Even if you can somehow
hack a build into a working state, I'd consider it an accident waiting
to happen.

Is there a specific reason you can't use dynamic linking on this
platform?  It's not a platform I know well, but I thought it supported
something akin to DLLs.

-- 
Colin Watson (he/him)                              [cjwatson@debian.org]