[HOpenGL] Compiling HOpenGL under recent versions of GHC

[Sven Panne]

Andres Loeh wrote:
> Thanks for the pointer -- I had seen some other thread, but not this
> one. The dependencies still seem to be "broken" in Gentoo, but
> apparently SuSE also patches, so it's really broken somewhere else.

Hmmm, I've just had a look at the Gentoo package list and the Mesa version
seems to be 3.5, which is almost 3 years old. Is this really what is used
on current Gentoo systems? There have been tons of bug fixes and feature
additions since then in the Mesa libs.

> So, if I understand the situation correctly: reversing the library
> order in package.conf may work for ghci, and might not do any further
> harm under Linux at all, but generally is not a good solution because
> it breaks compilation on some other platforms. Therefore it would be
> better to integrate the dependencies between the libararies properly
> into the .so files.

Exactly. The GNU ld pages are quite clear about the order of archives, see
the description of the -l option:

    http://sources.redhat.com/binutils/docs-2.15/ld/Options.html

    "The linker will search an archive only once, at the location where it
    is specified on the command line. If the archive defines a symbol which
    was undefined in some object which appeared before the archive on the
    command line, the linker will include the appropriate file(s) from the
    archive. However, an undefined symbol in an object appearing later on the
    command line will not cause the linker to search the archive again.

    See the -( option for a way to force the linker to search archives multiple
    times."

After reading this, it is a miracle for me why the order doesn't seem to matter
on my SuSE Linux... %-]

Cheers,
    S.