Kyle Yuan's Weblog

Tuesday August 31, 2004

Dependency

I have struggled with a library dependency issue for days. It is the WebBrowser component in JDIC.

As the xpcom library has a lot of backward compatibility issue, my app has to use xpcomglue library, and it also depends on libgtkembedmoz.so, libgtkembedmoz.so depends on libxpcom.so (my app doesn't). But if I link my app without -lxpcom, ld will complain:

ld: warning: libxpcom.so, needed by ../../../../dist/bin/libgtkembedmoz.so, not found (try using -rpath or -rpath-link)

I wonder why the dependency of libxpcom.so was not solved during linking libgtkembedmoz.so? Another thing confused me is that this only happens on Linux, Solaris' ld works fine with the same source code/makefile. How does Linux ld work? Is there any tools on Linux which can find out the exact dependencies, i.e. what symbol belongs to what library?