coreutils: tsort background
7.6.1 ‘tsort’: Background
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‘tsort’ exists because very early versions of the Unix linker processed
an archive file exactly once, and in order. As ‘ld’ read each object in
the archive, it decided whether it was needed in the program based on
whether it defined any symbols which were undefined at that point in the
link.
This meant that dependencies within the archive had to be handled
specially. For example, ‘scanf’ probably calls ‘read’. That means that
in a single pass through an archive, it was important for ‘scanf.o’ to
appear before read.o, because otherwise a program which calls ‘scanf’
but not ‘read’ might end up with an unexpected unresolved reference to
‘read’.
The way to address this problem was to first generate a set of
dependencies of one object file on another. This was done by a shell
script called ‘lorder’. The GNU tools don’t provide a version of
lorder, as far as I know, but you can still find it in BSD
distributions.
Then you ran ‘tsort’ over the ‘lorder’ output, and you used the
resulting sort to define the order in which you added objects to the
archive.
This whole procedure has been obsolete since about 1980, because Unix
archives now contain a symbol table (traditionally built by ‘ranlib’,
now generally built by ‘ar’ itself), and the Unix linker uses the symbol
table to effectively make multiple passes over an archive file.
Anyhow, that’s where tsort came from. To solve an old problem with
the way the linker handled archive files, which has since been solved in
different ways.
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coreutils: tsort invocation