Re: make the shared library optional

[Vicente Olivert Riera <Vincent dot Riera at imgtec dot com>]

Dear Petr Machata,

On 11/04/2014 05:01 PM, Petr Machata wrote:
> Vicente Olivert Riera <Vincent.Riera@imgtec.com> writes:
> 
>> I'm having a failure when doing a static build of elfutils because it
>> tries to build a shared library (.so). Could it be possible to add a
>> configure option to disable the shared library so only the static one
>> (.a) would be built?
> 
> Note that fully static builds are problematic.  elfutils uses dlopen to
> open the EBL backends (the CPU-specific support snippets), so even if
> you link statically, the final binaries are still considerably dynamic.
> 
> One option (that we use in Red Hat Developer Toolset) is to statically
> link in just the backends that you are interested in.  There were some
> problems with mutual dependencies between elfutils libraries, and I
> ended up having to split the libraries into smaller parts and adding
> linker scripts that brought the pieces together.
> 
> Mark and I have branches with this code--his is more recent, as he's
> been doing that work lately.  They are named {pmachata,mjw}/RH-DTS.
> 
> (Note that we still build the dynamic parts though, as eu-readelf
> et.al. can still use the dynamism, it's just customer code that needs
> the static bits.  I'm not really sure what your bug is, just dropping my
> two cents WRT lack of real static support in elfutils.)

thank you very much for your reply and your detailed explanation. I have
decided to send a patch to not allow elfutils to be built statically:

http://patchwork.ozlabs.org/patch/406941/

Best regards,
-- 
Vicente Olivert Riera
Graduate Software Engineer, MIPS Processor IP
Imagination Technologies Limited
t: +44 (0)113 2429814
www.imgtec.com