At 14:30 2005-05-25, Bennett, Patrick wrote:

[delete] [Bennett, Patrick] Personally, I think the pragma 'link' options are an absolute disaster for large projects.

apparently you've worked with different folks than I. Likely, different kinds of "large projects", too.

It's far, far too easy to end up with lots of libraries getting linked in with users having no idea how or why they're being linked against. Since many developers tend to be rather over-eager in #including headers (bah, just include it all!)

sounds like "many developers" need to be re-edcuated. or, perhaps, you need better code walkthroughs.

it's quite common for library x to include library y which happens to include library z. Users then wonder why their application is suddenly dependent on libraries they never even 'use'. Libraries linked against should always be completely explicit IMO

yeah, I woulda bought that right up until Microsoft introduced incompatible options in their silly "see 8 things at a time" _GUI_ option settings (property pages). BTW, those are a perfect example of why I dislike GUI for most things, it gets abused horribly (yeah I know, let's just educate people how to write them correctly).

(or managed by a build system that documents the dependencies). When the linkage is explicit, the cases where libraries have too many inter-dependencies (usually incorrect) tend to get fixed pretty quickly.

Patrick Bennett

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