Re: What happened to libtool transitive DSOs?

[Bob Friesenhahn]

On Thu, 21 Jun 2018, John Calcote wrote:

> Hi Bob. It's an ubuntu distro release - Linux Mint 18. Why would they do
> that?

GNU Linux and the GNU linker support implicit library dependencies. 
When a library which implicit library dependencies is linked, the 
libraries it depends on to successfully link are automatically added 
by the linker, but are not additionally recorded as dependencies.

The implicit dependencies (and explicit dependencies) are again used 
when the program is started by ld.so.

Using implicit library dependencies successfully is actually a bit of 
work but it is very useful to OS distributions which want to update 
libraries (or groups of libraries) via a package manager without 
needing to update dependent applications or libraries.

The normal libtool operation is to record all of the involved 
libraries as dependencies since they are all added to the link line.

Bob
--
Bob Friesenhahn
address@hidden, http://www.simplesystems.org/users/bfriesen/
GraphicsMagick Maintainer,    http://www.GraphicsMagick.org/