RE: better support for AIX 5.1

[Boehne, Robert]

Dan,

Yes, even on AIX when you archive the object files output
by the compiler, you get a static library.
My understanding is that you can create a single archive file
with both static and shared in it (and several versions of the shared).
By making a single shared object with -qmkshrobj or -bM:SRE out of
the object files (calling it shr.o or libfoo.so.1) and adding
all of these to the archive.  When a user links to this archive
specifying -bstatic, it will static-ly link to the library.
To dlopen the shared archive, you must set RTLD_MEMBER (or some such)
in the flags, and dlopen the form "libfoo.a(libfoo.so.1)".
IIRC, in libltdl, the flags aren't set correctly so the AIX style
shared libraries can't be dlopen'd.
As far as the test suite goes, last time I checked, NFS and AIX
were the reason that there were failures, not anything in Libtool.

HTH,

Robert

-----Original Message-----
From: address@hidden [mailto:address@hidden
Sent: Friday, June 06, 2003 10:01 AM
To: address@hidden
Cc: Boehne, Robert; address@hidden
Subject: Re: better support for AIX 5.1


Most of the static or non-shared libraries I have seen on AIX are
created by simply archiving the individual .o's spit out by the
compiler.  The linker never touches them.

Dan

> From address@hidden Thu Jun  5 18:58:02 2003
>
> Here is the problem, or misunderstanding.  AIX does not build static 
> libraries unless the -bstatic flag is explicitly used.  The objects foo.o 
> bar.o etc are by definition shared objects. 
>