Greetings,
busybox is linked via the scripts/trylink shell script. I have
found a couple issues with trylink's management of additional libraries:
1. https://git.busybox.net/busybox/tree/scripts/trylink#n123
This "sanitization" phase changes the semantics of the LDLIBS list.
When you give a list of additional libraries, the order is important:
higher-level libraries must be given before lower-level ones, else
linking might fail.
The call to "sort" may change the order, which can break dependencies.
The fix is to manually scan the list to remove duplicates without
changing the order, which can be achieved with a few lines of shell,
but I'm wondering if it's even necessary: giving the same -llib
several times on the linking command line does not change the result
(there are exceptions, such as when linking libgcc, but those are
very special cases, and in those cases all the instances of -l are
needed, so if anything it's an argument to keep the lib list as is),
and extra spaces do not seem to hurt the rest of the script - except
for starting and trailing ones, which are rather easy to remove.
I can provide a patch, but I don't want to bother with the whole
deduplication thing if the community and the maintainer agree that it
can be removed. Or better, see below.
2. https://git.busybox.net/busybox/tree/scripts/trylink#n145
trylink attempts to build with as few additional libraries as it
can get away with. This is not correct. In some cases, the libc
provides stubs, so linking works without additional libraries, but
additional libraries are needed to get the full functionality, so
attempting to build without the additional library, seeing that it
works, and removing the -l argument yields a binary that does not
have the functionality the user wanted.
An example is utmp functionality with the musl C library: musl
provides utmpx.h stubs that do nothing, and the utmps library
( https://skarnet.org/software/utmps/ ) can be used to implement
real utmp functionality on top of musl - but at the moment, busybox
cannot be built with utmps, because trylink sees that it links
without the "utmps skarnet" arguments (which it reorders as
"-lskarnet -lutmps" due to the call to "sort" mentioned above, which
would be incorrect even if it kept them), removes them, and makes it
impossible to have the desired utmps functionality in the busybox
binary.
My suggestion is to axe the whole part of the trylink script that
attempts to outsmart the user, and to take everything provided as
CFLAGS, LDFLAGS and LDLIBS quite literally. (LDLIBS should not even
have to add the -l parts before the library names, but we can keep
that for compatibility.) If the user wishes to have a convoluted
list of LDLIBS, let them; if the busybox binary has too many
dependencies as a result, it's on them. As is, trylink is just
getting in the user's way, which is antithetic to the minimalism
principles that busybox should follow.
What do you think?
--
Laurent
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