illogic-al.Org

There are things. Things I believe I should not have to know. Things I wish I did not know. And then there are other things, things which, whether I want to know them or not, are so pertinent to the issues at hand that it would be fatal to not know them. This is one of those things. This too.

Why am I telling you this? Because I have died, I have died and gone to a hell where my primary tormenters go by the names gcc and xine. I have suffered a fatal error, and I do not know things; things which could make it better; things which I probably would not want to otherwise know. It all started off innocently enough with a bug report against xine-lib. There was the vain hope that this would lead to a fix for my problem. The developers were quite helpful in trying to solve my problem and we actually got one issue taken care of.

Then came the World Breaker.
ld: absolute addressing (perhaps -mdynamic-no-pic) used in _tomsmocomp_filter_sse from .libs/xineplug_post_tvtime.lax/libdeinterlaceplugins.a/libdeinterlaceplugins_la-kdetv_tomsmocomp.o not allowed in slidable image
Foolishly, I declared myself rid of my adversary, moving on to implement the campaign which I assumed would lead to certain victory. Alas, it was not to be so.

I had trouble applying this "fix" to my problem until I happened upon this little gem from the ld_classic(1) man page

OPTIONS
Ld understands several options. Filenames and options that refer to libraries (such as -l and -framework), as well as options that create symbols (such as -u and -i), are position-dependent: They define the load order and affect what gets loaded from libraries. Some ld_classic options overlap with compiler options. If the compiler driver cc(1) is used to invoke ld_classic , it maybe necessary to pass the ld_classic(1) options to cc(1) using -Wl,-option,argument1,argument2.

Allow me to highlight the salient section: it maybe necessary to pass the ld_classic(1) options to cc(1) using -Wl,-option,argument1,argument2. That turned this little failure of a line (used previously)
./configure --enable-macosx-video --enable-coreaudio --prefix=/opt/local --without-esound --with-external-ffmpeg --without-x LD=/usr/bin/ld_classic LDFLAGS="-read-only-relocs suppress"
into this little failure of a line
./configure --enable-macosx-video --enable-coreaudio --prefix=/opt/local --without-esound --with-external-ffmpeg --without-x LD=/usr/bin/ld_classic LDFLAGS="-Wl,-read-only-relocs suppress"
which, after further research begat this little pearl of expected success
./configure --enable-macosx-video --enable-coreaudio --prefix=/opt/local --without-esound --with-external-ffmpeg --without-x LD=/usr/bin/ld_classic CFLAGS="-Wl,-read_only_relocs,suppress"

It failed, and I, could not for the life of me figure out why. Back to the man pages. I was attempting to pass options to ld(_classic) through the compiler. I checked the cc manpage whereupon i found this little gem:

-Wl,option Pass option as an option to the linker. If option contains commas, it is split into multiple options at the commas.

This seemed very true because I had noticed exactly that happening in the output of xine-lib's compilation. i.e., -Wl,-read_only_relocs,suppress became -Wl,-read_only_relocs,-Wl,suppress. Alas, this was not to blame for my errors, and so I sat, as a man forlorn. Beaten. Defeated. There were other things tried, all of which failed. So it was that I limped away, a man defeated. By things; Things I now wish I did know.

By the way, I now have many reasons to hate automake and the rest of the autosuite. Long live CMake, death to autotools. And mark my words, this is not over yet!