Re: How do I link to a shared lib without having that lib's dependencies (the way MS link does)

[David Wuertele <dave-gnus at bfnet dot com>]

HJL> If you want to give your users a libA.so, which isn't fully
HJL> functional at link-time, why not give them a dummy libA.so with
HJL> the same ABI for link-time only? I assume your run-time
HJL> environment is different from link-time. Of course, they can't
HJL> use the dummy libA.so for the the run-time environment.

I actually have two sets of users I want to satisfy: A) those whom you
describe, for whom there is no libB.so on their filesystem, and B)
those who are actually compiling natively but whom I don't want to
teach them the entire litany of dozens of dynamic libraries that their
programs will depend upon when all they need to know is that they
should link against libA.so.

For the second group of users, I can't give them a dummy libA.so,
because they need the real libA.so.

Each time I add functionality to my libA.so by porting other libraries
that it then depends upon, I have to tell my SDK users to keep editing
their Makefiles and recompiling their software, when in fact my libA's
API has not changed one bit, and there is no need for them *or* their
linkers to know at link time what dependencies libA.so has (they are
guaranteed that libA.so's dependencies will be satisfied).

Dave