Re: patch for building fat libraries on darwin

[Peter O'Gorman]

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Gary V. Vaughan wrote:
| No, it's me :-)  Please forgive my shallow understanding of fat
| libraries...

Well, the lovely thing about this patch is that the number of people who
would benifit from it (not counting Apple Computer) could probably be
counted on the fingers of one hand :)

The only thing it really does is make me happy that libtool passes all it's
tests when building fat on darwin, the need to ar x a fat library is
extremely unlikely, it only happens when either the max command line length
is exceeded, or there is no whole archive flag spec. Since on darwin 7 the
maximum command line length defaults to 256 Kb (libtool being conservative
says 64 Kb) exceeding that is unlikely, and a whole_archive_flag is supplied
(although I was hoping to eventually get rid of it, it causes libs to be
bloated).

Now, to confuse matters furthur, there is another solution to the fat
archive not being usable by ar x problem. Fat archives which have been
ranlibed can have their contents extrated using other tools. I avoided using
them because the above mentioned Apple Computer patched libtool-1.5 which
they shipped with Mac OS X 10.3 to include code to do this, and I did not
want to have code which looked even vaguely similar to theirs. My request
for copyright assignment to the engineer responsible led to naught, it seems
he may be afraid to deal with Apple's legal department.

The only solution I could come up with that didn't look like copying, and
allowed libtool to pass all it's tests was to have 2 copies of the lib. Note
that this only happens if the real lib tests as being fat, which will not
occur for anyone except the 4 people outside apple (me included) who
installed "pure" darwin on their systems.

Peter
- --
Peter O'Gorman - http://www.pogma.com
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