Hi, I'm in the process of adding libtool (and eventually automake) to Wine (http://www.winehq.com), and have a few questions about cross-platform support for a few important features that Wine needs or may need in the near future. First, Wine makes heavy use of convenience .o files, similar to convenience libraries, to gather all the single-file .o's in a directory into a single .o with 'ld -r'. However, I can't get libtool to link it properly. It seems to unconditionally convert .lo to .o, which fails if I use AC_DISABLE_STATIC. And it should! The composite .lo is later linked into a .so, which means it should use the .lo, not the .o. For now, I run these commands without libtool. Here's what I get _with_ libtool: /bin/sh ../libtool --mode=link ld -r generic.lo interface.lo ncurses.lo tty.lo xterm.lo -o console.lo /usr/bin/ld -r -o console.o generic.o interface.o ncurses.o tty.o xterm.o /usr/bin/ld: cannot open generic.o: No such file or directory make: *** [console.lo] Error 1 A related concern is the .la -> .so transition, which requires the $whole_archive_flag_spec variable. I noticed that Linux's --whole-archive and Solaris' -z allextract exist in libtool. How do other platforms fare with .a -> .so linking? I'd prefer to use .la archives, rather than the .lo ones mentioned above, but if this will paint us into a corner with future platforms, I suppose we'll have to stick with .o -> .so instead. It seems this will cause problems with automake down the line, so I'd prefer the .la solution. How does this sit with libtool and wide platform coverage? A couple future extensions Wine may (or may not) need eventually are support for -Bsymbolic, and linker scripts. As I understand it, -Bsymbolic is GNU-specific, and the option has different names on other platforms. Is this a good candidate for libtool support? How would libtool handle -Bsymbolic? Or would we have to handle it ourselves, in an autoconf check? And finally, linker scripts. I don't know much about them myself, nor how they work. Do they have anything to do with libtool? Anything we should be aware of before trying to mix libtool with our own linker scripts? Thanks a lot! I appreciate the tool, and use it wherever I can. John -- [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://www.gnome.org [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://www.worldforge.org
