comments on 1.0.2c snapshot

[David Champion]

On 2000.09.18, in <Pine.OSF.4.21.0009172055080.337522-100000 at dogbert.cc.ndsu.NoDak.edu>,
	"Tim Mooney" <mooney at dogbert.cc.ndsu.NoDak.edu> wrote:
> 
> Previous to Dave Champion's Solaris patch (from Tue, 25 Jul 2000), the
> shared objects were actually built on IRIX and Digital/Tru64 UNIX, only
> because of the happy coincidence that both gcc and the vendor compilers
> both use `-shared' to created a shared "library".  Dave's patch was correct,
> but it removed the "assume -shared works" logic in configure.in, so the
> happy coincidence is now gone.

I was hoping someone would notice this.  As I mentioned in the
comentary on my original post, what's needed is to emulate more of the
library linkage method detection used by libtool (or to provide
something different but sufficiently near to equivalent).

I don't like using libtool for actual builds, but what could be handy
is a change to libtool to allow it simply to emit the compiler flags
required for a given architecture.  Then one could say something like:
	$(CC) `libtool --emit-flags --arch=$(ARCH)` $(LIBOBJS) -o $(LIB)

I made that up on the fly.  No idea whether it could correspond to
reality, either for gpg or for libtool.

Alternatively, we could just produce more patches, with one clause per
platform descriptor pattern.  In producing the 25 July patch, I assumed
that most non-gcc compilers would not support "-shared", and that the
patch would at worst make things fail differently than before, but
really that only describes Solaris TTBOMK.  Perhaps someone could
broaden the defaults, and we could begin to supply cases for the
differing platforms.  The tricky part is to determine which flags are
required for a platform, and which are required for a compiler, and to
code a simple way of flexing these, since there are at least two
compilers one could use on most Unixes.

> I can submit a patch which should add special-case support for the necessary
> shared lib compiler flags for Tru64 UNIX, IRIX, and HP-UX, if there's
> interest.  We have Solaris and AIX here too, but I'm not familiar enough
> with AIX's weird loader to make sure I get all the details right.  Solaris
> would be easy to do, though.

For Solaris, just copy the patch I submitted as something
solaris-specific.  I've run AIX before, and could probably get access
again to try creating a case for it here, if no one else wants to.

-- 
 -D.	dgc at uchicago.edu	NSIT	University of Chicago