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From: Mikhail Teterin <mi+mx@aldan.algebra.com>
Organization: Virtual Estates, Inc.
To: questions@FreeBSD.org, current@FreeBSD.org
Subject: does the order of .a files matter?
Date: Wed, 8 May 2002 20:44:09 -0400
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Hello!

I'm trying to port a huge application to FreeBSD. The app's build
process creates over a hundred of static libraries (.a) and then tries
to link them (and a few object files) into the executable. The process
seems to work fine on the existing platforms (a number of Unixes and
NT), but on FreeBSD I keep getting unresolved symbols.

The most frustrating thing is, the number of such symbols varies greatly
with the order, in which I list the libraries on the command line. Is
not the linker supposed to make several runs over the given libraries if
needed?

Each .a is created "by the book":

        ar cq lib<NAME>.a `lorder ${<NAME>_OBJS} | tsort -q`
        ranlib lib<NAME>.a

and the executable creation is:

	cc ... -o <exe> ${<exe>_OBJS} ${<exe>_LIBS} ...

It "almost" works, if I try to bypass the libraries completely and just
link all of object files, but for the real application I hit the shell's
limit on the number of arguments -- there are too many object files.

Any suggestions? Thanks a lot!

	-mi

P.S. This is on ``FreeBSD 5.0-CURRENT #2: Fri Apr 26 13:04:00 GMT 2002''


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