Building a shared libgcc

[Alexandre Oliva <oliva at dcc dot unicamp dot br>]

On Aug  2, 1999, Jeffrey A Law <law@cygnus.com> wrote:

> He [Jason] thinks we just have to bite the bullet and go with a
> shared libgcc.

Wow!  That's cool, but what are we going to do to ensure that
libgcc.so is found at run-time?

One idea is to build libgcc (and the other run-time libs) with
libtool, and arrange that (some subset or equivalent of) libtool is
used to link with it.

Unfortunately, the shell version of libtool is probably too slow for
this, but the libtool team has considered rewriting libtool in C, to
speed it up.  We had given it up because it would require CC_FOR_BUILD
when cross-compiling, but now that CC_FOR_BUILD is being somewhat
standardized in autoconf, we could probably rely on it.

It would be a pity to duplicate all of libtool in collect2...  And it
would be really nice if users could be provided with portable
-R/-rpath switches, which we could easily accomplish with an
integration of libtool into gcc/collect2.

But then, maybe you'd rather just not worry about people who install
GCC on directories other than /usr/lib or /usr/local/lib.  I'd prefer
to arrange that gcc ensures that it uses the libraries it builds,
regardless of the installation prefix.

> I stronly doubt we'll fix this for the gcc-2.95 minor releases, but
> it would be good to fix it for the next major release.

Do you see any drawback in the patch for DU that arranges that libgcc
is fully copied into libstdc++, besides the fact that it might
introduce binary compatibility problems if it was to be reverted?  If
this is the only problem with it, we could install it forever, given
that it doesn't introduce any problem, and it fixes an IMHO serious
existing problem.

-- 
Alexandre Oliva http://www.dcc.unicamp.br/~oliva IC-Unicamp, Bra[sz]il
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