Re: Doc is misleading

[David Daney <ddaney at avtrex dot com>]

Matthew Woehlke wrote:
> gccNewbie wrote:
> > Matthew Woehlke-3 wrote:
> > > Linux lets you get away with this wrong link order due to lazy symbol 
> > > resolution, whereas Windows does not. What you have done is asked to 
> > > first link to libmylib. Since no objects (actually, you don't *have* 
> > > any objects yet!) require any symbols from libmylib, no symbols are 
> > > imported. 
> >
> > That solved my problem very well! I should have tried that, but it's even
> > better to have this explanation of why it works.
>
> Glad it was helpful! :-)
>
> > It's odd that the manual was so deliberately misleading on this! While 
> > I was
> > trying to solve this myself, I read: "You can mix options and other
> > arguments. For the most part, the order you use doesn't matter. Order 
> > does
> > matter when you use several options of the same kind; for example, if you
> > specify -L more than once, the directories are searched in the order
> > specified."
>
> Eeeeeeeh... *technically* it isn't wrong (you can mix -W, -f options, 
> for example) but I see why it confused you, and I agree that it *really* 
> ought to say something about -l being in the 'order can matter' 
> category. You are by no means the first person on Windows to get bitten 
> by this.
>
> To whoever maintains the doc: we really should add something like "Note 
> that the order of objects, including libraries specified by -l, DOES 
> matter on some platforms.", perhaps with an even longer explanation as 
> well such as what was in my previous post.

Perhaps reading this would be helpful:

http://sourceware.org/binutils/docs-2.17/ld/Options.html

I think it explains how it works.

David Daney