I am trying to compile GNU Coreutils as a set of shared libraries, instead of a set of executables. I thought that make would let me pass in a flag to tell it to do this, but from what I can see I would actually have to modify the configure.ac and Makefile.am in order to make this work. I would prefer not to do this, since this potentially introduces bugs into code that I can currently rely on being bug-free. I tried manually turning the object files into so's by entering:
make CFLAGS='-fpic'
gcc -shared -o ls.so coreutils/src/ls.o
I am able to create the so file, but there seem to be a number of flags that I am missing, and I don't see any way to access a list of necessary flags to compile and link the code (even though this information is clearly contained in the computer). The only thing I can think to do is manually go through all of the linker errors and try to figure out what flags are missing, but I'm hoping that there is a less tedious way of getting what I want.
Not sure what you're trying to do, but related to this is the ./configure --enable-single-binary option which links all objects to a single executable.