Re: remote linking.

[Ian Lance Taylor <ian at airs dot com>]

Elias Athanasopoulos <eathan@otenet.gr> writes:

> On Fri, May 10, 2002 at 12:12:08PM +0930, Alan Modra wrote:
> > On Fri, May 10, 2002 at 12:20:58AM +0300, Elias Athanasopoulos wrote:
> > >  % gcc -static foo.c -L192.168.1.2:/usr/lib/ -lbar -o foo
> >
> > Sorry, I don't think such a feature makes any sense.  You can nfs
> > mount remote directories if you want to do this.
> 
> You are right, because I didn't explain anything about the benefits
> and the usage of what I suggested. I use NFS in my LAN (FreeBSD, Linux)
> and I can compile/link a project using the resources of the other
> machine, but remote linking is quite more generic (actually the idea came
> up from NFS).
> 
> Consider there is a "library server". A machine that hosts various libs
> of differents versions. Everyone can use this machine and be able to
> compile/run everything he/she needs in his/her system, without having to
> upgrade tens of libraries. You just need an Internet connection,
> the source of the project and permission to use the resources of the
> library server.           

The library server can simply permit a read-only NFS mount from
anywhere.  Anybody who wants to use it can mount the disk.  You can
run NFS over a WAN; I've done it.

If there is some reason that that is unacceptable, then I think you
should write a separate program which looks at the command line,
downloads the required libraries, and executes the linker.  It does
not make sense to me to have code in the linker which does network
file downloads.  There are many other programs which can do network
file downloads; use them, rather than adding a new feature to an
existing program.

Ian