Re: Library dependencies in gtk+

[Owen Taylor <owt1 cornell edu>]

Toshio Kuratomi <badger@prtr-13.ucsc.edu> writes:

> [1  <text/plain; us-ascii (7bit)>]
> Hi.
>     Any reasons for not adding interlibrary dependencies between the
> gtk libraries?  (So when we link gtk into a program, we know to link
> glib and gdk as well.)  I know the libtool documentation says you can't link
> to uninstalled libs, but it's wrong on this account.  What you can't do is
> link to a relative path... I put
> 
>     -L`pwd`/../glib/.libs -lglib 
> 
> into the libgdk_la_LDFLAGS variable in gdk/Makefile.am and it worked fine.
> (Same sort of thing with gtk/Makefile.am)
> 
> Will that work for everyone?

No. This sort of thing does not work on most non-ELF platforms.

In fact, even the current linking against installed libraries can
produce bad results if the installed libraries happen to be
static. Versions of libtool after 1.0f disable such linking
entirely. (We've avoided upgrading for this reason, but there is a
good case to be made that we _should_ upgrade - it is better to make
people add a few libraries to there command line, than to have GTK
refuse to build on some platforms)

Regards,
                                        Owen