[PATCH] dependency list for static libraries

[Howard Chu]

Nick Clifton wrote:
> Hi Howard,
> 
>> Sorry for the noise, this attached is the same as previous but with fixes
>> to whitespace / indentation.
> 
> Thanks - the patch looks good now, although there are still a couple of minor
> issues - and one major issue:
> 
>   * The new test fails for the alpha-vms target.  This is not serious however
>     as almost all of the ar tests fail for this target.  One day I will track
>     down what is going wrong and either fix it, or arrange to skip these tests
>     for alpha-vms.
> 
>   * There are a couple of minor formatting issues.  Specifically: comments should
>     end in a period followed by two spaces before the closing marker. /* Like this.  */
>     Plus function calls should have a space between the function name and the 
>     opening parenthesis of the argument list.  like (this)

I can send an updated patch after the major issue is addressed.

> The major issue is that I would really like for this extension to be supported
> by the LLVM community as well.  It would be a shame to add it to the binutils
> only to have a different solution implemented there.  I might have misread the
> emails but I believe that Fangrui still has some misgivings about this approach.
> Is that correct ?  If so, then I would very much like to see them resolved 
> before we commit the patch.

It still seems pretty obvious that handling dependencies once at the library
level is more efficient than sticking a bunch of free-form notes in every single
object file. And it should also be obvious that choice of library is a buildtime
decision, not a decision made solely at the time the source code is written.
(And for shared libraries, it's a runtime decision - even further removed from
the time of code being written.)

-- 
  -- Howard Chu
  CTO, Symas Corp.           http://www.symas.com
  Director, Highland Sun     http://highlandsun.com/hyc/
  Chief Architect, OpenLDAP  http://www.openldap.org/project/