AIX: linking with 7.10 shared libs

Hi, This is for all you AIX users. We have just installed informix V7.10 and find that Informix is shipping only shared libraries, no static versions of their libs. While this is good we unfortunatly are having trouble linking with those libraries. The problem ( as I see it ) is that the libs are shipped as *.o, rather than *.a. I cannot use the -l linker flag as it is expecting the file passed to have a suffix of .a rather than .o. The other choice is to pass the library using the full pathname to the lib. But this then causes the full path to the library to be inserted into the executables loader section. As a result LIBPATH is not used to located these libs, as a result my customers would need to install their Informix product in the same place I install mine or create links. I cannot just rename the Informix libs as there are cross dependencies among the libs. My current work around is to create and use export files (for the Informix libs) to link rather than the actual libs themselves. This seems to work, but apparently is not what was intended as the product did not ship with them. So, has anyone had any success linking with Informix on AIX with the supplied shared libraries?? Am I missing a magic linker flag that will solve my problem of hard coding the path to the Informix libs?? I would appear that these do not follow the AIX scheme of creating shared libs, which are shared objects inside of an archive. Had this been the case then these libs would work as well as IBM supplied libs. Any clues would be appreciated. I posted this to the AIX news group a while back. Got one suggestion to use VPATH, but that does not seem to work either as its a make thing which ends up passing the full path to the linker anyway. Bye, Leroy -- Leroy Levin Texas Instruments: email levin@ief.itg.ti.com