Re: Why does libca.so depend on libreadline.so?

[Michael Davidsaver via Tech-talk <tech-talk at aps.anl.gov>]

On 5/6/23 23:12, Dmitry Yu. Bolkhovityanov via Tech-talk wrote:
> P.S. Yes, I'm aware of a "COMMANDLINE_LIBRARY=EPICS" flag (which took some time to figure out :D), but the question remains -- why any commandline editing is needed for network communication libraries at all?
This is a side-effect of the convention we use to support both dynamic and static linking
with one configuration.  Since static libraries do not carry dependency information, when
linking statically it is necessary to give a complete list of all dependent libraries
when linking any executable.  This includes libreadline when libCom depends on it.

One simple way to avoid this over-linking in the dynamic case by passing "-Wl,--as-needed"
when linking.

(assumes GCC or clang on an ELF target)