[Pan-users] Re: Are gmime and pcre required during runtime?

[Duncan]

Phil <address@hidden> posted
address@hidden, excerpted below, on  Fri, 20
Jul 2007 09:13:18 -0700:

> Ah, to answer my own question:  I see now that both pcre and gmime have
> compiled statically.  So pan found ligmime-2.0a, libpcre.a etc to
> statically link in.
> 
> These libs compile by default statically, or is there something they
> didn't like about my system to make shared libraries?

You don't say so I'm assuming that LiveCD distro was Linux, not one of 
the BSDs or some such.  Also, you seem to know some already as you were 
able to discover the static linking on your own, so forgive me if this is 
a bit basic.

On Linux, at least GNU/Linux (so using the GNU libc and linker, might be 
different if a different userspace libc and etc are used), *.a libraries 
are static, *.so* libraries are dynamic.  What was compiled in would 
depend on what the linker found to compile in.  If it comes across the 
static libraries first, it'll compile them in.  If it comes across the 
dynamic libraries first, it'll use them.

It's quite possible the LiveCD you were using arranged things so the 
static libraries were first in the compiler/linker search order, so you /
wouldn't/ have problems running stuff you'd just compiled and saved, 
after a reboot.

FWIW, here on Gentoo/amd64, naturally compiled from sources, such issues 
come up from time to time, because dynamic libraries need compiled and 
linked with -fPIC on AMD64 (x86_64, so the Intel version as well), while 
static libraries don't as they are compiled directly into the apps.  If 
the library build is trying to compile once and use the same object files 
for both static and dynamic libraries, there's generally a problem, since 
one needs -fPIC and the other doesn't.  Sometimes the problem can be 
worked around by simply manually adding -fPIC to the CFLAGS/CXXFLAGS, 
other times not.  Beyond that, I generally file a bug and let the Gentoo 
amd64 arch devs handle it.

-- 
Duncan - List replies preferred.   No HTML msgs.
"Every nonfree program has a lord, a master --
and if you use the program, he is your master."  Richard Stallman