Re: Multilib and Linux.

[Alexandre Oliva <oliva@dcc.unicamp.br>]

On Apr 20, 1999, hjl@lucon.org (H.J. Lu) wrote:

> Everyone has to be very careful not to put libraries and .o files
> with the wrong ABI in a directory.

The linker should be able to detect it and refuse to link code from
incompatible ABIs.

>> > It looks like more than one Linux targets which have to deal with
>> > 32bit/64bit ABIs. We should have a common strategy to deal with
>> > all those issues. Should we create a mailing list for it?

>> This is something libtool could help with.

> We have to convert everything to libtool. It is not a trivial task.

But not that hard either.  Think about adding wrapper scripts for ar,
ranlib, ld and gcc that would call a pre-configured libtool with the
proper flags.  It would be almost automagic.

Another alternative that comes to my mind is to extend gcc so that it
implicitly creates multilibbed shared object files, given -fPIC, and
automatically links them together into appropriately named multilibbed
shared libraries.  ld might have to be involved too, as might
ar/ranlib, if we were to create multilibbed static libraries.  But
this would waste quite a lot of compile-effort for objects that are
not going to become part of shared libraries.

-- 
Alexandre Oliva http://www.dcc.unicamp.br/~oliva IC-Unicamp, Brasil
{oliva,Alexandre.Oliva}@dcc.unicamp.br  aoliva@{acm.org,computer.org}
oliva@{gnu.org,kaffe.org,{egcs,sourceware}.cygnus.com,samba.org}
*** E-mail about software projects will be forwarded to mailing lists