Re: Static GNUstep libraries build on ubuntu

[giddings]

Hi Adam and others,
I'm a long-time Gnustep user (from the 90's) who has worked a bit with
Jainab on her attempted static build, so perhaps I can fill in a bit more
detail.

The reason she is seeking to build statically is so that we can distribute a
compute job over a heterogenous linux cluster.  We need to be able to send
our binary out to arbitrary machines (that will not have Gnustep installed,
since we do not control them), and have it run, using Condor.

Now, I went back to a 2-year old copy of Gnustep and Ubuntu, and our build
worked fine statically, i.e. first building Gnustep as static, then building
our program statically (but there are other compatibility problems due to
such an old set of libraries).

Then we tried multiple scenarios to get it building under Ubuntu 8.1 with
the latest Gnustep from SVN, and it fails in the gnustep-gui build
(gnustep-base works fine).  

I tracked down the failure that Jainab mentioned to link to the tiff
library.  I was able to get this to compile statically through manual
intervention, but only by rearranging the listing of the libraries at the
linker command (or, by listing libtiff twice).  It seems that gcc 4.2 is
exhibiting weirdness regarding linking statically, and this doesn't
necessarily seem to be a Gnustep issue, though it could be.  Our next step
is to try to revert to gcc 3.3 or something, to see if this works.

So that brings me to your post.  Can you clarify why you think that the
latest Gnustep is not capable of being built statically?  This is actually a
very critical issue for Gnustep to get used by people.  Not only for our
attempts at distributing compute jobs on a cluster, but also for our ability
to distribute binaries to people "that just work" (e.g., especially on
Windows), without complex Gnustep installs.  If there are particular things
that you think are "broken" for static builds, perhaps we will attempt to
fix them, but it would help to know what they are.

Thanks again,
Morgan

BTW - Jainab's response sounds like she is being sarcastic in saying "Thanks
a LOT!," but she is not a native speaker and did not realize that sounds
sarcastic.



Adam Fedor-5 wrote:
> 
> I really doubt you'll be able to compile gnustep as a static build.  
> The was a time long ago when that might have been possible.  We still  
> even have a flag in gnustep-make to build the backend as a library  
> rather than a bundle.  I'm not sure that works anymore and that  
> certainly isn't the only problem you'll have.
> 
> On Nov 25, 2008, at 3:00 PM, dhusubali wrote:
> 
>>
>> Hello,
>> I am trying a static build of GNUstep libraries in ubuntu.  I was  
>> successful
>> until GNUstep/core/base library. When trying to compile gui library  
>> I got
>> problem while linking. Somehow gui does not recognize libtiff library.
>> However, I see that both libtiff.a and libtiff.so.4.2.1 are in usr/ 
>> lib/.
>> Any help would be appreciated. Thanks in advance.
>>
>>
> 
> 
> 
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> Help-gnustep@gnu.org
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> 
> 

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