Static linking?

[Mstrodl]

saldl -v

git @ 0926ac1

Describe the issue / How to reproduce

As far as I can tell, it doesn't seem possible to compile saldl statically... It would be really nice to have statically linked binaries available for download because the curl dependency can be hard to manage on some systems (particularly older Debians or even modern Ubuntu). Saldl is particularly useful to me as a time saver but I'm not sure there's much of a net gain if I'm spending all my time just trying to get it to compile...

log output (if needed)

My attempt seemed to almost work until I got to linking... Eek!

[Mstrodl]

Actually adding -fcommon made my (shared library) build at least work on alpine (turns out it was a shared library issue too)

[MoSal]

Thank you for reporting this.

The -fcommon fix is pushed. Are there any other issues with static linking?

[Mstrodl]

@MoSal I'm not sure, -static seemed to cause a bunch of issues... Ideally I think there should be a publicly available build statically linked available for download ^^

[Mstrodl]

After looking at what you did: you REALLY should be using extern to fix the cases at the source rather than just forcing -fcommon....

[Mstrodl]

From the docs:

In C code, this option controls the placement of global variables defined without an initializer, known as tentative definitions in the C standard. Tentative definitions are distinct from declarations of a variable with the extern keyword, which do not allocate storage.

The default is -fno-common, which specifies that the compiler places uninitialized global variables in the BSS section of the object file. This inhibits the merging of tentative definitions by the linker so you get a multiple-definition error if the same variable is accidentally defined in more than one compilation unit.

The -fcommon places uninitialized global variables in a common block. This allows the linker to resolve all tentative definitions of the same variable in different compilation units to the same object, or to a non-tentative definition. This behavior is inconsistent with C++, and on many targets implies a speed and code size penalty on global variable references. It is mainly useful to enable legacy code to link without errors.