shared library dependencies (again)

[James Henstridge <james daa com au>]

Since libtool version 1.4 has just been released, I thought I would bring
up the issue of adding support for shared library dependencies (since Owen
said he didn't want to look at the problem until a stable libtool that
handled them was released).

I filed a bug in bugzilla about this a while back, and have attached
patches for glib, pango and gtk+ to it since then:
  http://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=50707

I haven't had any problems with the patches on my machine, and it fixes
the dynamic loading problems with pygtk mentioned in the bug report.  I
haven't seen any breakage caused by the build changes, which is promising.

The one issue with my build patches is compiling pango modules into
libpango.  In order to have correct dependencies in the modules, libpango
must be built first.  But to compile modules into libpango, the modules
must be built first.  I haven't worked out how to address this.  The patch
makes things work in the case where no modules are compiled into libpango.

These changes will benefit any programs that dlopen libgtk (or indirectly
through a module linked to libgtk) without the RTLD_GLOBAL flag.  This is
mainly language bindings, but there may be some other cases as well.

James.

-- 
Email: james daa com au
WWW:   http://www.daa.com.au/~james/