[Bug-tar] tar and static linking

[Christian Weisgerber]

So you are on a system that has gettext in an extra libintl (and
possibly libiconv, too).  You want to link tar statically, say for
recovery purposes, but you don't want to drop NLS support.  How do
you do this?

(1) You configure with LDFLAGS=-static.  You expect this to do the
trick.

(2) The configure script doesn't simply check for generic -lintl -liconv,
but insists on something very specific, e.g.:

checking how to link with libintl... /usr/local/lib/libintl.so 
/usr/local/lib/libiconv.so -Wl,-rpath -Wl,/usr/local/lib

Result: You end up with  -static /usr/local/lib/libintl.so [...].

This doesn't work.
On FreeBSD 9, ld produces an error; configure already concludes
that linking with libintl just doesn't work and disables NLS.
(On OpenBSD, linking succeeds but you get a dynamic executable.)

I guess this isn't so much a tar problem as a gettext/libiconv/gnulib
one.

-- 
Christian "naddy" Weisgerber                          address@hidden