On Tue, 2005-08-23 at 14:04 -0600, Orion Poplawski wrote: > Jakub Jelinek wrote: > > But in that case not just for x86_64, but for all architectures. > > If the library is small and is expected to be only linked into small shared > > libraries, -fpic can be used instead. > > What small means is architecture dependent, on i386/x86_64 -fpic/-fPIC are > > identical, on other arches it can mean e.g. 4K got entries limit or similar. > > But I don't know what shared libraries it will be link to, so shouldn't > I use -fPIC to be safe? Or are there other drawbacks? Hi Orion, According to the GCC docs, -fpic and -fPIC are basically identical in i386 systems since they have no inherent limits on the GOT size. There is, however, a limit on PowerPC systems! So, in the interest of not wasting time on these fiddly annoyances that will only potentially bite Fedora ppc users, I'd skip -fpic and go straight to -fPIC. Please! ;-) And I think it would be nice if adding -fPIC was strongly recommended for all *.a libs since people almost inevitably want to use them (at some later date) to build shared libs. Ed -- Edward H. Hill III, PhD office: MIT Dept. of EAPS; Rm 54-1424; 77 Massachusetts Ave. Cambridge, MA 02139-4307 emails: eh3@xxxxxxx ed@xxxxxxx URLs: http://web.mit.edu/eh3/ http://eh3.com/ phone: 617-253-0098 fax: 617-253-4464