Flurry of GMP check failures

[Niels Möller]

tg at gmplib.org (Torbjörn Granlund) writes:

> This fails:
>   $ gcc sym.c -c -fno-pic && gcc sym.o m.c

I guess we never need to pass -fno-pic to gcc, we should either pass
-fpic, when building shared library, or no pic-reaetd flags at all, when
building static libraries and executables. Right?

Problem is that when -fpic is on by default, assembly files need to use
pic conventions too. And to get this right automatically we'd need
configure to detect whether or not pic is on by default.

Or change the x86_64 assembly files to always use pic. Is there any
penalty to that? My understanding is that pic is somewhat of a pain with
32-bit x86, due to lack if addressing modes using pc + offset, but quite
nice and easy on x86_64.

> I'm migrating from Debian to Gentoo for GMP's testing, so unless
> Debian's approach is gaining momentum in the GNU/Linux world, we could
> just ignore this.

If debian is following ubuntu, I think we have to say there already is
some considerable momentum at work.

For reference, in Nettle, everything is built as pic by default since
the 1.11 release back in 2004. The motivation back then was the use case
that an interpreter, e.g., pike, loading it's crypto support code
dynamically using ldopen("Nettle.so"), and the corresponding .so file
then linked statically to libnettle.a. To get a non-pic static library,
one has to configure with --disable-shared --disable-pic, but I haven't
heard about anyone actually doing that.

At this point in time, I think use-cases involving static libgmp.a (or
libnettle.a) are somewhat obscure.

Regards,
/Niels

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