Re: FYI: update convenience.at (was: Solaris, combining a bunch of convenience archives)

[Olly Betts]

On 2005-12-03, Ralf Wildenhues <address@hidden> wrote:
> There'll be quite a bit of systems/compilers where this will fail.
> I wonder whether libtool should just go ahead and generate a fake
> extra object in the case where only convenience archives are given,
> and 'whole_archive_flag_spec' is nonempty.  Thoughts?

This (5 year old!) thread seems relevant:

http://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/automake/2000-11/msg00127.html

The main problem was (and I don't think this has changed) that when
using libtool from automake you need a source file to infer the tag
from.  For C++ this often matters, for example.

AIUI, this is really a particular case of the more general issue that
automake+libtool doesn't consider the languages that objects in
convenience libraries were compiled from when deciding how to link.

Fixing this seems rather hard - you'd need to store source information
in .la files I think.  And it's easy to work around (e.g. just add in a
dummy C++ source when creating a library from C++ objects in convenience
libraries).

Cheers,
    Olly