[tex-live] libstdc++ linking

[Karl Berry]

Hi Staszek, and all,

It isn't pretty, but I managed to get a build of the lcdf binaries with
libstdc++ (but not libc) statically linked, by running our build script
with CXX set:
  CXX=cxxhack Build
where cxxhack is a one-line script:
  exec gcc "$@" -Wl,-Bstatic -lstdc++ -Wl,-Bdynamic -lm

Can you give that a try?  For now, I checked in the i386-linux lcdf
binaries I built on tug.org using this.

Some of the output from configure looked doubtful ("no -lstdc++"), but
the binaries (including pdfetex) can do --help, anyway.  I didn't try to
actually do anything real.

Explanation: it turns out that (incredibly annoyingly) g++ does not use
the specs file to determine the final link command -- the stdc++ part is
hardwired into the binary, and no environment variable or runtime
configuration can change it, as far as I could see.  Thus, the idea is
to use gcc instead of g++ or c++ for the front-end compiler, and link
with -lstdc++ ourselves.  g++ automatically links with -lm, so we do
that too.

Perhaps there is a cleaner way to alter the lcdf configure setup to
achieve the same link line, but I could not find it offhand.  I wrote to
bug-automake for advice.  If anyone has any ideas, so much the better. 

For the record, this web page:
  http://www.trilithium.com/johan/2005/06/static-libstdc/
has more details and a warning that static linking with libstdc++ can
still fail in the face of various exception-related stuff.  I sincerely
hope that won't be an issue for us.

Thanks,
Karl