[Fontconfig] libtool -no-undefined: why windows only?

[Tor Lillqvist]

Christian Biesinger writes:
 > I saw that fontconfig uses the -no-undefined flag only on windows. Why 
 > is that?

Most probably because when it was ported to Windows one didn't want to
risk breaking anything on some Unix platform, so out of politeness the
switch was introduced only on Windows.

 > It seems to me like that would be a useful flag on all platforms,
 > to avoid unintentionally leaving undefined references in the
 > library.

I agree. Using -no-undefined (at least if it really would do what it
says on Linux, I think it might not?) is good for programmer
"discipline" and helps keeping code structure and DSO
interdependencies cleaner. (Case in point: Evolution, where there are
several cases of circular dependency among DSOs. Building that beast
on Windows requires having separate bootstrap dummy import
libraries...)

--tml