Re: creating relocatable binutils

[Mike Frysinger <vapier at gentoo dot org>]

On Thursday 12 February 2009 14:53:04 Maurizio Vitale wrote:
> I've been able to get relocatable rpms for binutils by linking the
> binutils executables statically, but this is not ideal (to be honest I
> haven't benchmarked real compilation to see whether it really makes a
> difference and the difference in size doesn't bother me at all).
>
> Dynamic linking would require the user (or rpm, but this is immaterial)
> to run ldconfig on relocated binutils' lib directory (where libopcodes
> and libbfd live). Unfortunately this requires root permissions.

you dont need to statically link the entire program, just dont build shared 
library versions of the binutils libs.  many distros do not.  statically 
linking in libbfd and libopcodes really isnt that big of a deal with these few 
apps.

> One way I see is to use -rpath whan compiling binutils, but
> (although I haven't tested it) I believe the rpath must be an absolute
> directory, which makes this solution unsuitable for me (only the end
> user would know the final destination).

if you use $ORIGIN, you can give it a relative path.  then the assumption is 
that the relative path from the executable to the shared libs will always be 
the same (and it sounds like that is an assumption you can make).

./bin/as -> rpath of $ORIGIN/../lib/
./lib/libbfd.so....

> Another way is to force gcc to set  LD_LIBRARY_PATH before calling ld or
> as. In my case I can assume that the gcc installed location will be
> related to binutils' in a known way and I could derive the right
> LD_LIBRARY_PATH setting. But this approach doesn't look nice.

no, that's an awful idea.  dont do it!
-mike

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