Hereby a use case, which is not handled by native builds at all, but which is not as uncommon as one might think.
Not all static libs on Linux/BSD are actually a collection of objects, some just contains text such as
GROUP ( librte_pmd_i40e.a librte_cfgfile.a )
This is used to combine a number of static archives into a single reference. When linking against these it is many times necessary to pass something like
-whole-archive, --start-group, -l, nameOfLib, --end-group, --no-whole-archive
Currently there is no way of handling this in Gradle except for doing it direct
linker.args '-whole-archive', '--start-group', '-l', 'nameOfLib',
'--end-group', '--no-whole-archive'
It might be worthwhile adding something to PrebuiltStaticLibraryBinary to tag certain libraries to be within positional groupings on the command-line. I appreciate that Gradle cannto cope with all possible combinations, so maybe adding some methods such as
prefixFlags( String... args )
postfixFlags( String... args )