problem with building libraries on AIX 5.3

[Ken Raeburn]

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On Aug 24, 2007, at 22:57, Matthew Andrews wrote:
> so, my question is, if we were to revert the -rtl patches, would it  
> make
> more sense to make the plugin code look for .a files as well as .so
> files, or would it be preferable to add rules to generate .so files  
> for
> plugins even though normal linking on AIX expects .a files unless you
> are doing run-time linking.

 From what I've heard here, it sounds like maybe .so would be the  
logical suffix for plugins, even on AIX, but the configuration  
settings from shlib.conf and/or the makefile fragments may need  
tweaking to better distinguish the suffix for dynamically loadable  
objects from the suffix for shared libraries, where on non-AIX UNIX  
systems they've otherwise been the same.  (It probably shouldn't be  
hard-coded as .so in the Makefile.in files, but if we go this way,  
it'll still be correct for UNIX systems.[*])

 From testing I've done in the past, when we had a working AIX 4  
system, dlopen won't work on an archive library if you give it  
"foo.a" but can work on "foo.a(bar.o)" if you get the right member  
object name, and perhaps a special flag.  I don't think we want to  
take that approach though.  (AIX 5 may have changed that.)

Ken

[*] At some point we may want to build bundles on Mac OS X instead of  
simple .so files, but we don't currently.  The current code should  
support loading both kinds.
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