I am working on the build system for a fairly large project, which will produce a static and a shared-object version of a library. In order to keep the project manageable, it has been divided into several modules.<div><br>
</div><div>Each module is currently building as a static library, and the Jamroot for the project lists all of the applicable sub-projects as dependencies. However, I found that it was in fact building an empty library, both in static and dynamic mode!</div>
<div><br></div><div>Doing some poking around, I discovered that for the static build, it was not passing ar the static libraries at all, instead only giving it one system shared library to link against. I also discovered that in dynamic mode, it was giving ld the appropriate list of libraries, but ld was ignoring them.</div>
<div><br></div><div>Upon further investigation, I discovered that neither ar nor ld will accept static (.a) libraries as arguments to build a library by default. ar expects object files, which would require the relevant .a files to be unpacked, and ld will only include .a files in a dynamic library if you use the --whole-archive flag preceding the list, and the --no-whole-archive flag following it. </div>
<div><br></div><div>I therefore currently have to execute the last linking step manually after boost-build executes, which is far from ideal. What would be the best way to handle this in boost-build? Is there another way I can type the modules so that they will return a bunch of object files instead of a library? Is there a way to make boost-build aware of how to create a library from a library? What is the cleanest solution?</div>
<div><br></div><div>Thank you in advance for your help</div>