Re: [PATCH] cygwin sharedlib build fixes, terminfo

[Charles Wilson]

Thomas E. Dickey wrote:
> (but the point was that there's more work to do than simply applying the
> patch - last night I also tried the same patch with the automake 1.4.3

                                                             ^ libtool?

> that I have for testing, and it didn't build with that either).

As I said, libtool-1.4.3 does not explicitly support any language other 
than C, although it sometimes works by accident.  There's this whole 
algorithm where libtool intuits what std libs are included by the 
specified compiler, and then calls ld directly with --no-std-libs, but 
explicitly adds the intuited stdlibs back to the command line.

There are good reasons for this behavior -- but the behavior doesn't 
really mesh well with C++ (especially as implemented in libtool-1.4.3).

One of the issues with C++ is that there are other link objects that 
need to be handled but which are not included in the std (c++) libs. 
Sometimes they are bare .o's, and sometimes the code is generated on the 
fly by the c++ compiler.  (static initializers, etc)  So substituting 
the use of the linker directly would be a bad idea...

Anyway, all of this is why it took two years (in volunteer-labor 
time...) to get libtool-1.5 out the door.  The multilanguage support 
required architectural changes; it's not surprising that using 
libtool-1.4.3 to compile c++ libraries is, er, fragile.

--
Chuck