Hi, all, again.
Now that Ted and I are going through the headaches of linking, extensions, shared objects, and their ilk, I have a suggestion about how we are linking Inkscape.
Currently, the main Makefile.am is built at automake time to Makefile.in by reading all of its Makefile_insert files from the various subdirectories. The final 'inkscape' target is made as the result of libinkpre.a, all of the sub-libraries from each of the Makefile_inserts, then libinkpost.a. This is because of link-order problems.
This is just my opinion, but wouldn't it be easier/cleaner to make one large libinkscape.a by concatenating it from each of (pick one)
libBlah_a_SOURCES or libBlah_a_OBJECTS
... in each of the Makefile_inserts???
Then we would have one nice reference library that can be used by other projects, can be made into a .so or .dll, and that can more easily export its symbols.
And best of all, there would be no link-order problems.
This would in no way alter the set of Makefile_inserts that we have in the build tree. The main Makefile would merely use different information from them. The small .a's would still be built (or be buildable) and everyone can still do their private testing. It would only change the makeup of the large libinkscape.a lib.
Any thoughts? This would not affect the majority of devs, but would -GREATLY- simplify the world for those of us who need to worry about link issues.
Bob