Re: building shared libraries on a.out variants of NetBSD

[Alexandre Oliva <aoliva at redhat dot com>]

On Dec 22, 2000, Richard Earnshaw <rearnsha@arm.com> wrote:

> Please reread what I wrote.  I said explicitly that this will only work 
> with  gcc-2.97.

Which means it's wrong to have this patch in a libtool file.  Libtool
(including the copy in GCC) must work reasonably well with any
compiler.  A copy of this very file is used as part of a complete
bootstrap (including binutils), in which case you can't assume the
compiler is GCC 2.97.

Besides, as a maintainer of both the GCC build machinery and libtool,
I don't want them to diverge.  That will only give us trouble in the
long term.  Please rework your patch for the libtool files so that it
doesn't break older versions of GCC and NetBSD.

> I also noted that the master libtool cannot be used as is to build
> the libstdc++-v3 shared library because it does not know how to get
> the exception tables registered.

Which means that's the problem that has to be fixed.  I believe the
multi-language libtool, which is what we use in GCC, already has some
infrastructure to figure out what additional object files GCC passes
to the linker so that we can properly support C++ initializers, etc.

I'm not aware of the existing problems in NetBSD, though.  Maybe
there's just no way of creating C++ shared libraries with GCC on older
versions, in which case we'd disable shared libraries on those
platforms, not silently break them.

-- 
Alexandre Oliva   Enjoy Guarana', see http://www.ic.unicamp.br/~oliva/
Red Hat GCC Developer                  aoliva@{cygnus.com, redhat.com}
CS PhD student at IC-Unicamp        oliva@{lsd.ic.unicamp.br, gnu.org}
Free Software Evangelist    *Please* write to mailing lists, not to me