On Wed, Nov 04, 2009 at 01:01:32PM +0000, Tim Bunce wrote:

>  It seems to me that -Duseshrplib conflates two things that should be
>  separate: a) the building and installing of a shared libperl, and
>  b) linking the perl executable against it instead of the libperl.a.

Should we therefore compile all object code with -fPIC, with the same
object files linked statically to the perl executable, and used in the
shared library?

Or should we compile everything twice, once with -fPIC and once without,
using the -fPIC code for the shared library, and the normal code for the
executable?

The distinction between -fPIC and not matters on at least x86_64

(It used to matter on ARM, but they found a way to deal with relocations,
such that build systems that assumed that all world is a VAX 2.0 would
still work)

Nicholas Clark