Why does my build of gcc not support shared libraries

I have built gcc-4.9.0 in a Debian Lenny chroot, on a Debian Wheezy host. The arch=Armel (Wheezy and Lenny). I have used the following configure options:

$PWD/../gcc-4.9.0/configure --prefix=/usr/local/GCC-4.9.0 --enable-languages=c,c++ --with-arch=armv4t --with-float=soft --enable-checking=release --enable-shared --build=arm-linux-gnueabi --host=arm-linux-gnueabi --target=arm-linux-gnueabi LDFLAGS=-Wl,-no-keep-memory --disable-libjava

When I try to build some libs (libgcrypt in this example) I am not able to build shared libraries:

checking whether the /usr/local/GCC-4.9.0/bin/gcc linker (/usr/local/GCC-4.9.0/bin/gcc) supports shared libraries... no
checking dynamic linker characteristics... GNU/Linux ld.so
checking how to hardcode library paths into programs... unsupported
checking whether stripping libraries is possible... yes
checking if libtool supports shared libraries... no
checking whether to build shared libraries... no
checking whether to build static libraries... yes`

And for Curl:

gcc: error: ../lib/.libs/libcurl.so: No such file or directory
make[2]: *** [Makefile:923: curl] Error 1

Am I still missing some configure option(s) when building gcc?

Phil Turner

Posted 2019-06-10T21:29:24.960

Reputation: 3

1There should be a config.log file in the directory you ran ./configure from while trying to build libgcrypt. That file will give you more info about what ran and possibly why it failed. – Patrice Levesque – 2019-06-10T23:51:37.407

Libgcrypt built but with static libs instead of shared. The config.log only confirms this by stating that the linker (gcc) does not support shared libraries. – Phil Turner – 2019-06-11T15:47:27.217

What does the config.log say exactly? there should be a test of some sort that ./configure does to determine shared libraries support, it does not get that information from thin air. Usually the config.log file indicates at what ./configure lines the test runs. – Patrice Levesque – 2019-06-12T00:02:42.730

checking whether the /usr/local/GCC-4.9.0/bin/gcc linker (/usr/local/GCC-4.9.0/bin/gcc) supports shared libraries... no is weird — linker should normally be ld. – Patrice Levesque – 2019-06-12T00:03:39.813

Thank you Patrice, well spotted. The problem was that linker was incorrectly pointing to gcc instead of ld (a typo on my part) – Phil Turner – 2019-06-12T11:53:05.797

Happy to help. I'll repost as a real answer, as prescribed in https://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/294791/what-if-i-answer-a-question-in-a-comment

– Patrice Levesque – 2019-06-12T18:27:26.917

Why does my build of gcc not support shared libraries

Answers