Re: static musl-based gdb and -fPIC

["writeonce@midipix.org" <writeonce@midipix.org>]

On 04/29/2014 10:57 PM, Rich Felker wrote:
> 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?
Pardon.  The expat pkg-config file (expat.pc) is fine.  It is the gdb 
script that passes /full/path/to/libexpat.so to the linker, which then 
complains about an attempt to statically link a dynamic library.  As far 
as I can tell the problem is somewhere in the configure script under the 
gdb sub-directory.

>
>> 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
>
>
The purpose of building a static python was to make a static libpython.a 
available for gdb.  Given the loss of functionality on both the python 
and gdb ends, it might be better to leave the two dynamically linked as 
they were meant to be...

zg