dependency list for static libraries

[Howard Chu <hyc at symas dot com>]

We often get link errors when switching from dynamic linking to static 
linking, because dynamic libraries list all of their own dependency libraries, 
and static libraries don't. (And the program being linked doesn't know about 
those indirect dependencies.)

It Would Be Nice if we could add a dependency list to a static library too. 
Much like ranlib creates an index for a static library already, store the list 
of dependencies in a reserved module.

It seems to me I've made this suggestion before but Google and my memory have 
failed to locate it. We'd need either a new tool like ranlib, or a new flag to 
ar to store a list of dependencies, and then linker support to lookup the 
dependency list whenever referencing a static library.
--
  -- Howard Chu
  CTO, Symas Corp.           http://www.symas.com
  Director, Highland Sun     http://highlandsun.com/hyc/
  Chief Architect, OpenLDAP  http://www.openldap.org/project/