[Bf-committers] scons and static libs

[Ken Hughes]

I don't know if the other platform managers have this issue, but it's a 
bit of a pain to make the releases using the minimum number of shared 
libraries.  My solution has been to create a separate directory 
containing the static libs I want to use and then override the default 
scons variables  for them.  For example, I link OpenAL, OpenEXR, and PNG 
statically.  I can't use the "out-of-the-box" static libs since gcc 
needs to separate the shared and static libs with a "-Xlinker -Bstatic".

I'd like to propose one of two solutions:

(1) Specify the libs using a shared (".so") or static (".a") suffix.  
Parse each BF_*_LIB string and tack the lib into either a shared or 
static list, then send these to the linker separated by the appropriate 
platform-specific flags ("-Xlinker -Bstatic" for linux, for example).  I 
played with the output of scons and found that this worked reliably, 
including the shared or static OpenGL libs.

(2) The static OpenGL libs are handled by passing the explicit static 
libs to gcc.  This can't be done as far as I can tell using something 
like BF_FREETYPE_LIB='/usr/lib/libfreetype.a' because scons expands 
BF_*_LIB to a string of libs with "-l" tacked on the front of each.  I 
played around with tools/Blender.py and found it wasn't too hard to 
check for something like "/usr" or ".a" in the BF_*_LIB strings and if 
true tack those libs onto the static library list.

Ken