f77 and forward reference lib searching

[YATES, JOHN H.]

I have a user porting a large code from Berkeley UNIX to the SGI System V.
After commenting out all the ranlib's in the makefiles,(and a few other
changes) he found that the many libraries are searched in a forward reference
manner only. i.e. if lib2 calls routines in lib1, they are not found.
(in fact, he tells me that it is a forward reference search only within
a given library.)

This is indeed documented in the f77 manual (page 1-8 in the
Fortran 77 Programmer's Guide, Document Version 2.0).

I have suggested the following for building his code.

Change:
f77 prog.o lib1.a lib2.a lib3.a lib4.a 

To:
f77 prog.o lib1.a lib2.a lib3.a lib4.a  lib1.a lib2.a lib3.a lib4.a  \
lib1.a lib2.a lib3.a lib4.a lib1.a lib2.a lib3.a lib4.a  ...

until it finds everything. It won't make the executable any bigger, but
it isn't very tidy. (a similar thing happened to me on a DEC-10 years ago).

Is there a better solution?

Thanks, John
yates at a.chem.upenn.edu