Kaffe and HP-UX 10.20

[Ralf Hildebrandt]

On Tue, Nov 10, 1998 at 11:43:08AM -0700, Godmar Back wrote:

> I have no clue what you're talking when you say "infamous HP linker problem".
> However, if you have a solution as to how we can change the configure/make
> setup so that it would work, we would be happy to see it and include the
> patches.  Send them as unified diffs.

Hi!

Here is what Gordon Matzigkeit (author of libtool) says about the
"infamous HP linker problem":

It's not so much a bug as a missing feature.  The AIX and HP-UX
linkers like to hardcode the absolute path to a shared library into
all the executables that link against them.  This is all fine and
dandy for installed libraries, but they don't provide any way to
override this behaviour for uninstalled libraries.

So, you can't properly link a binary against a library until *after*
you've installed the library.

For packages that only have libtool libraries or only have binaries
that use libtool libraries, there is no problem, but if your package
has some of each, and you want to test out the binaries before you
install them, then libtool has to do relinking.  In other words, at
build time, it creates a binary that has hardcoded paths to the
uninstalled libraries in it, then at install time, it installs the
libraries, then relinks the binaries against the newly-installed
libraries.

Whew.

On other systems, things are a lot simpler.  You can pass flags to
tell the linker which directories to hardcode, and tell it not to
hardcode the build directory.  That makes a binary that works properly
both before (using the libtool-generated wrapper script) and after you
install its libraries.

BTW, I've just committed a change to soften the warning, so that
libtool now prints:

libtool: link: warning: this platform doesn't like uninstalled shared libraries
libtool: link: `hell' will be relinked during installation

I hope that explains the problem nicely to all you folks out there who
aren't that familiar with it yet. ;)

-- 
 Gordon Matzigkeit <gord at fig.org> //\ I'm a FIG (http://www.fig.org/)
    Lovers of freedom, unite!     \// I use GNU (http://www.gnu.org/)

-- 
Ralf Hildebrandt <R.Hildebrandt at tu-bs.de> http://www.stahl.bau.tu-bs.de/~hildeb
Die kuerzesten Computerwitze:
1) Muesste laufen.
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