Kaffe has adopted GNU libtool to ease the creation of shared
libraries, where available, and static libraries, where shared
libraries are unavailable or undesirable.  Whether a library is shared
or static is totally transparent to the application that uses libtool
and to the user.

Any libtool library can be made static by adding -static to its link
command.  You can do that manually by removing the .la file in the
corresponding directory and running `make AM_CFLAGS=-static' within
that directory, then running make in the top-level directory.

In order to provide dynamic linking, or simulate it, Kaffe uses
libltdl, a library that is part of libtool.  It currently supports the
following dlopening mechanisms: dlopen, shl_load, GNU DLD, BeOS'
load_add_on and MS-Windows' LoadLibrary.

Additionally, it supports dlopening simulation for platforms that lack
shared libraries (or have shared libraries disabled) through the
dlpreopen mechanism, in which a symbol table is created when the
program is linked and it -dlopens a set of libraries.  If any of these
libraries is static, libtool will link the library into the program
and add its symbols to the dlpreopening symbol table.  It's that
simple.

In order to implement this dlpreopening mechanism, libltdl needs some
help from the main application.  Therefore, a call to
lt_dlpreopen_default() was added to kaffe/kaffe/main.c.  In order to
support dlopening simulation, any other application that links with
libkaffevm should also be linked using libtool, and it should be
created with the flag -export-dynamic, so that the symbol table is
created.

By default, on platforms that lack dlopening mechanisms, Kaffe will be
linked with its own libraries only.  You may extend this list of
libraries by setting the JAVA_LIBS flag to a list of libtool (.la) or
regular (.a/.so/.sl/.lib) libraries.

If the same symbol is defined in more than one library, it is possible
that linking (either static or dynamic) fails.  If it does not fail,
which symbol libltdl will select for a given name depends on the
sequence of dlopening of the libraries, and the mechanism libltdl uses
to dlopen them.


By default, libtool compiles each file that may become part of a
library twice.  It does so because a file must be compiled with PIC
(position independent code) in order to become part of a shared
library, but this sometimes imposes some overhead, and libtool
believes that a static library shouldn't impose this overhead.
Therefore, libtool uses an object file with PIC to build a shared
library, and one without PIC for static libraries.

Kaffe changes this libtool default so as to avoid double compilation,
so you'll get only PIC object files if shared libraries are supported
and not disabled, and only non-PIC ones otherwise.  You may force
non-PIC objects to be created with --enable-static; you may force
libtool not to create shared libraries by configuring
--disable-shared.  In fact, --disable-shared is almost equivalent to
--with-staticlib --with-staticvm; the only difference is that
--with-staticlib does not affect libltdl, whereas --disable-shared
does.

Libtool's hompage is here:

    http://www.gnu.org/software/libtool/libtool.html

--
oliva