On 6 Jul 1998, Ty Sarna wrote:

: > The fix is to make the package compile with -fPIC instead of -fpic - that
: > is, incidentally, the way all PIC-library packages should be compiled.
: > Again, GNU binutils ld can cope with it, but by adding a bunch of extra
: > indirection and code (which slows things down).  This package should compile
: > with -fPIC, not -fpic, on _all_ platforms.
: 
: The selection of -fpic ultimately derives from the configure script in
: the python package. If it really should be -fPIC always, I'll add a
: patch to change it (also for FreeBSD/OpenBSD) and send that to
: python.org as well.

The point is that -fpic is intended for "small" (where "small" is a
platform-dependent quantity; on SPARC and m68k, 64K) libraries which can use
"short" or "word" branches to jump around in the code as opposed to "long"
branches.  -fPIC ensures the use of long branches in the generated code,
which is a minor slowdown, but allows creation of libraries larger than that
platform-dependent amount.

I say that "all" PIC-compiled packages should use -fPIC because just about
all of the things we want to compile as PIC will go over that 64K limit. 

-- 
-- Todd Vierling (Personal tv@pobox.com; Bus. todd_vierling@xn.xerox.com)