Re: make puzzle

["Johnson, Andrew N. via Core-talk" <core-talk at aps.anl.gov>]

On Nov 8, 2020, at 12:29 PM, Michael Davidsaver <mdavidsaver at gmail.com> wrote:

On 11/6/20 4:00 PM, Johnson, Andrew N. wrote:

Why might you want to use NO + NO?

I had no idea that you considered this to be a valid combination.
At least I can understand why I was confused.

…

The setting YES+YES is probably less useful (build lib.so files but link binaries statically – it ought to work, but seems fairly pointless).

As it happens, this is the combination I've long used (and recommended) where supported.
Since I consider the two settings mostly orthogonal on *nix, it makes sense to me for
shared libraries to always be built.  Then individual applications are left with the
choice of whether to link support modules statically.

Note that on macOS (Darwin) you can’t link executables statically at all, Apple don’t provide some necessary file(s) such as crt.o for that, so setting STATIC_BUILD=YES always fails. The closest you can get to an application built statically is thus to set SHARED_LIBRARIES=NO which at least pulls all of the EPICS code into the final executables.

(imo, the example of non-PIC assembly is a bit of a reach these days)

Probably true, that was just the first reason that came to mind; there are others for why one might want to avoid building a shared library.

- Andrew

-- 

Complexity comes for free, simplicity you have to work for.