Re: static musl-based gdb and -fPIC

[Rich Felker <dalias@libc.org>]

On Tue, Apr 29, 2014 at 05:40:06PM -0400, writeonce@midipix.org wrote:
> I built a static gdb (v7.7, passing --disable-gdbserver to
> configure) and _thought_ that everything was fine.  Then I checked
> the build logs and saw that gdb refused to use the present libexpat,
> libncurses/tinfo, and libpython.  In the case of expat, at least,
> the "solution" was easy, albeit unacceptable: temporarily break my
> local system by renaming libexpat.so (so that gdb cannot find it).
> But for ncurses and python that didn't work.
> 
> It appears that expat is passed to the linker as a full path
> (/full/path/to/libexpat.so) rather than normally (-lexpat), which
> makes the whole thing break since there is no way to request a
> static expat instead.  Note, however, that this problem is not
> musl-specific
> (https://sourceware.org/ml/crossgcc/2013-06/msg00003.html).

It's not clear at all to me from your email or from the linked thread
who the passer in "is passed" might be. Is this something broken in
gdb's build script, or expat's pkg-config or similar, or ct-ng, or
something else?

> At this point I am no longer seeking a solution (unless you have one
> ready), but thought I should share this for the record.  As an
> aside, it looks like the static python interpreter is missing some
> modules as well (see, for instance,
> https://trac.torproject.org/projects/tor/ticket/7557).

Static python is not very useful since most important python
extensions are partly implemented as C code, which necessarily must be
dynamically loaded.

Rich