Code::Blocks and the terror of -l+

 02/18/2019

Month 4, Week2

Author: Devin Wright

 This last week was spent trying to convert an old Windows OpenGL demo to work on Linux for use in my postmortem. While doing this I ran into a lot of linker errors due to ether missing or incorrectly linked libraries. After, fixing most of these errors on the computer running Linux Mint, with some help from Lari, we were left with a linker error where it was trying to link to -l+. However, -l+ was not being included in the projects linker settings, so we tried to create various other project types and were getting the same error.  So, we tried using a different IDE we switched from Code::Blocks to Eclipse. After,  some more work I was able to get everything to compile in Eclipse, but we wanted to fix Code::Block as it would be a lot of work to switch everything over to the new IDE. So, we tried switching our compiler from GNU GCC to Clang, but Clang was having a problem with including pthread and wouldn't work.  We also tried wiping and upgrading all of the related software including Code::Blocks to no avail. Then on the verge of just wiping and restoring Mint on the computer, I found that Code::Blocks has global linker settings and in there was the -l+ that was breaking all of our Code::Blocks projects and somehow survied the purge of Code::Blocks, after deleting it everything compiled just fine.

The plan for this next week is to focus on writing up documentation for future Gateware developers and end users.  This will be in the hopes of helping dev out of the sticky situations that exist on Mac and Linux. Such as the understanding of runloops and similar API on Mac, or the lack of resources on Linux.