Re: library checks are driving me crazy!

[Bob Proulx]

aaragon wrote:
> Brian Dessent wrote:
> > aaragon wrote:
> >> ... LIBS="-lblas -lsuperlu_3.0 -lCGAL -lloki" ...
> >> Those symbols belong to the blas library. So it turns out that superlu
> >> depends on the blas library. I compiled superlu with its own blas library
> >> so
> > 
> > The order that you specify things to the linker matters.  If
> > -lsuperlu_3.0 needs symbols from -lblas then it should come before it in
> > LIBS.

> I actually tried both ways before posting and none work, I have the same
> error.

It may be that they have done the bad thing of creating a circular
dependency.  In that case both must come before the other.  That's bad
but unfortunately not fatal.  I say unfortunately because if it were
fatal then people would be stopped from doing it.

In the case of circular dependencies you may need to specify the
libraries multiple times.  Perhaps something like this:

  LIBS="-lblas -lsuperlu_3.0 -lblas -lCGAL -lloki"

The linker scans across the line left to right and pulls in code to
satisfy unresolved symbols that are unresolved at that point in the
link.  As code is pulled in that creates more unresolved symbols from
a previous library it may be necessary to list previously scanned libs
again.  And even again if needed.

  LIBS="-lblas -lsuperlu_3.0 -lblas -lCGAL -lloki -lsuperlu_3.0 -lblas"

I showed an extreme example above and I hope it doesn't come to that
but sometimes in the face of bad project design these types of things
are needed to work around the problems.

By the way...  If this is the problem then this is just a problem of
misdesign in this project and doesn't really have anything to do with
autoconf.  The same would be true if they were not using autoconf.

When I am debugging these types of issues I will cut and paste just
the link line from the build to be able to reproduce the link on the
command line without using 'make' or other tools.  Then debug down to
root cause from there.  After determining what the flags need to be
then I can reconfigure using those flags.  This avoids the configure
and full project make overhead which I fear you may be looping
through and reduces the problem to just the link phase of the build.

Bob