Why long command line for libgcj.so?

[Alexandre Oliva]

On Jun  4, 2002, "H . J . Lu" <hjl@lucon.org> wrote:

> I suspect stack/heap/memory limit. My machine has 1GB RAM. The problem
> is it is almost impossible to run ld in gdb since the command line
> for building libgcj.so is way too long. May I ask why we can't use
> "ld -r" or "ar"/--whole-archive to build libgcj.so? Is that because
> libtool doesn't support it?

On the contrary: it does it this way because it's more efficient.

If we were to use ld -r or ar, we'd either have to have multiple
linking steps (and possibly run into per-object GOT size limits, in
the ld -r case) or have to create an archive out of PIC objects.  If
there are no command line length limits that requires us to take one
of these approaches, we just go with everything in a single link
command.

You can force libtool to do multi-step `ld -r' linking by setting the
cache variable that contains the maximum command-line length to a
smaller number.

-- 
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                Professional serial bug killer