Re: [Caml-list] MacOS port and file formats

[Mary Fernandez <mff@research.att.com>]

Hi Jacques,

Thanks for your message.  Here is what I am trying to do.

My O'Caml application is an XQuery engine.  It has three
APIs: one for O'Caml, one for C, and one for Java applications.

We create a native-code, dynamically linked
C library that includes our O'Caml library, the O'Caml runtime,
and several other C libraries that our application depends upon
the unix, nums, str libraries plus an external PCRE library.
We actually do this by hand with ocamlopt (not ocamlmklib)
because in the past, we found ocamlmklib did not work consistently
on all platforms.

What I have found is that if the dll*.so libraries are Mac bundle
files, then I get a linking error of the form 
"...ld: /Users/mff/ocaml-3.08.2/lib/ocaml/stublibs/libstr.dylib is input
for the dynamic link editor, is not relocatable by the static link
editor again..."
(Note that the default name of dllstr.so is not recognized by the 
Darwin linker).  If I re-compile the otherlibs/ in stublibs/
to be dynamically linked libraries, then I have no problems.
Also, if I just use the archive files, that works too -- but
I typically use O'Caml with dynamic libs enabled which is how
I tripped over this problem.

We only create a dynamically linked library, because 
our Java library call the C library, and the Java JNI requires
dynamically linked C libraries.

So, in short, I have something that works, but still dont'
understand why bundles and dynamically linked libraries caused
me trouble.

Thanks,Mary

On Fri, 2004-12-31 at 04:23, Jacques Garrigue wrote:
> From: Mary Fernandez <mff@research.att.com>
> 
> > I have a question regarding the ./configure options for MacOS/Darwin.
> > 
> > ./configure selects the -bundle option for MKSHAREDLIB, which
> > has the effect of creating MacOS bundle type files for the dynamically
> > linked libraries in lib/ocaml/stublibs.  I have had trouble linking
> > these bundle files with the standard dynamically linked libraries
> > created with the -dynamiclib option.    As an experiment, I replaced
> > -bundle by -dynamiclib and attempted to rebuild the O'Caml compiler,
> > but got an error deep in compilation of the compiler.  Ultimately,
> > I just made the otherlibs/* libraries by hand with -dynamiclib and was
> > able
> > to link my application.
> > 
> > I will admit that I am overwhelmed by the Darwin documentation
> > that explains how to port a Linux application to MacOS. 
> > Can someone explain why the -bundle option is necessary to the compiler
> > compilation?
> > Is it because the O'Caml compiler a full-fledged Mac application?
> 
> Could you explain exactly what you are trying to do?
> The dlls in stublibs are only intended to be dynamically loaded by an
> ocaml application. The reason bundles are used rather than dynamic
> libraries is that the API for bundles is simpler, and that their
> explicit intent (plugins) seems close enough to the use of dlls in
> ocaml.
> Note that a bundle can depend on dynamic libraries, so this should not
> induce other limitations.
> 
> Jacques Garrigue
-- 
Mary Fernandez <mff@research.att.com>
AT&T Labs - Research