Bug#614148: guiqwt: FTBFS: tries to include non-PIC FORTRANobject in shared library

[Aaron M. Ucko]

PICCA Frédéric-Emmanuel <frederic-emmanuel.picca at synchrotron-soleil.fr>
writes:

> I am wondering if the problem do not comes from f2py and/or maybe from gfortran.
> - f2py do not pass the -fPIC flag when building a module. is it right ?
>   I need to send a mail to the numpy mailing list about this.
> - gfortran : why this difference between amd64 (ko) and i386 (ok)???

i386 historically tolerates non-PIC code in shared libraries, whereas
amd64 (like the majority of architectures) is stricter, in part (IIRC)
because it can better afford to be so -- on i386, generating PIC code
requires taking away one general purpose CPU register, which are already
in short supply, whereas amd64 offers extra registers and an addressing
mode that allows directly specifying offsets relative to the instruction
pointer.

That may also explain why f2py leaves off -fPIC -- if its developers
still mostly work on 32-bit systems, they might not have run into any
errors stemming from its absence themselves.

-- 
Aaron M. Ucko, KB1CJC (amu at alum.mit.edu, ucko at debian.org)
http://www.mit.edu/~amu/ | http://stuff.mit.edu/cgi/finger/?amu@monk.mit.edu