Continuing to tinker with the OpenSSL problems I’ve been having. Have a chunk of software whose building requires the older version of OpenSSL to be installed. But I want the newest OpenSSL dev package on my machine. We’re not going to get along.

I discovered I could selectively static link some of the libraries into the program. This was completely mind blowing feature to me. I started using the GCC linker way way back and was quite disconcerted by the -lfoo syntax which would find libfoo.a for linking.

In trying to force this software to build against a local copy of the older OpenSSL, I found problems with the final program trying to find the OpenSSL dynamic libraries. LD_LIBRARY_PATH would allow me to aim the software at my local lib but I was hoping there would be something simpler (that didn’t require setting that env var every time). Could I static link the executable? It’s been a while since I tried to static link a Linux app.

Quick google and found an even better answer:

https://stackoverflow.com/questions/6578484/telling-gcc-directly-to-link-a-library-statically

In the Makefile, I simply had to use -l:filename to link directly to a specific static library. With the -L flag, I could aim at a specific library location.

LDFLAGS += -lffi -lutil -lz -lm -lpthread -l:libssl.a -l:libcrypto.a -lrt -ldl

I had no idea this was possible with the linker. I’ve been using the GNU compilers for so many years and had no idea this was possible.