[sword-devel] About what gets linked.....

[Jonathan Marsden]

Dmitrijs Ledkovs wrote:

> I did some digging and analysis about that link flags are added while
> building libsword. ...

> 1) Curl. Instead of using curl-config to use PKG_CHECK_MODULES macro

This is probably a good solution, and it should be portable.  But I'd
vote for this happening in SWORD 1.6.1, not being done just in patches
for the Debian/Ubuntu packaging.  Submit a patch, and we'll see if we
can get SWORD to accept it :)

> 2) Icu. The option I see is to filter the output such that libicuio
> and libicudata are not linked. (although some of the code suggest that
> in the past these were explicitly added)

That feels ugly... maybe you'd need to try and get response from the ICU
developers; logically they should have had a reason for specifying those
libs.

> In addition to library all of these link flags are passed to all of
> the utilities. Although most of the utilities are using these headers.
> So I would in addtion suggest to reset / override link flags in the
> utilities/Makefile.am to make sure that they link in only what they
> need (e.g. zlib for a couple of them)

Yes; if you can come up with a working patch to the Makefile.am I'd
think it would be happily accepted :)

> I really would love to have these "extra" dependencies libraries to be
> dropped from debian packages. I can put together packages of sword
> with "--as-needed" flag for some more testing but I really hope that
> it could be sorted out the correct way.

This isn't a Debian/Ubuntu-specific issue, really.  It's an issue with
the upstream SWORD codebase and its build system.  So it "should" be
fixed there (in SWORD 1.6.1 or 1.6.2 or whatever) rather than just for
Debian/Ubuntu packages.

None of this is a showstopper for getting SWORD 1.6.0 into Debian and
Ubuntu, though, so we should probably focus on completing that, first.

Jonathan