an installation bug in either gcc, gld, or readline -- I don't know which

[Andrew Koenig]

Phil> On Wed, Dec 26, 2001 at 05:40:45PM -0500, Andrew Koenig wrote:
Phil> The -shared option, among others, /is/ translated by the
Phil> compiler driver into linker-specific options.  One of the most
Phil> common bug reports we get occurs when Solaris users configure
Phil> GCC to use {Sun,GNU} linkers and assemblers, but at runtime "the
Phil> other one" is actually found.

>> That makes sense.  Sigh.

Phil> It's a tangle.  Most of the bug reports actually occur when the
Phil> above confusion takes place while /building/ GCC, not while
Phil> using it.  There's no particular bug in the GCC build; many of
Phil> us consider the "bug" to be that so many people fall into this
Phil> trap so easily, but we don't have any good solutions in mind.

That's a shame.

I encountered vaguely related problems in building gcc3.0 because
shared libraries are now the default, which means that you have to
do one of the following three things to get anything to work at all:

   1) Install stuff in /usr/lib
   2) Insist that every user set LD_LIBRARY_PATH when executing
      a gcc executable
   3) Set LD_RUN_PATH during compilation

Phil> Ideally, readline and suchlike need to ask GCC "hey, what linker are you
Phil> using?" and GCC needs to answer in a portable way.  Right now this isn't
Phil> possible at either end.  Hmmm...

An alternative might be a --with-gnu-ld option as gcc has.

>> What was your guess?

Phil> Either Rocky Mountain National Park, or somewhere in Switzerland.

I've had one email that suggested it might be the Khyber Pass