Underlinking - for extension creators

[bmarkus]

I had a strange issue few days ago compiling a program against libax25. Compilation was OK, no error messages nor warnings but running it (a Python module written in C) didn't start claiming a missing reference to inflateEND. Was also strange, that other applications using libax25 were OK without such message.,

Finally I found it was a so called underlinking issue. This is a good summary of the problem:

http://wiki.mandriva.com/en/Underlinking

In my case the solution was to rebuild libax25 with the -lz linker switch.

It may affect other extensions too and the extension building process.

[curaga]

That's a bug in libax25 (library uses zlib but doesn't link it) then.

[bmarkus]

Yes, but google'g around found that it happenes frequently with other libraries too and makes people's life hard to fix. Just good to know.