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Date: 17 May 2000 14:45:09 +0000
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From: "Michael Ring" <Michael DOT Ring AT t-mobil DOT de>
To: "cygwin-apps AT sourceware DOT cygnus DOT com" <cygwin-apps AT sourceware DOT cygnus DOT com>
Subject: Re: Shared vs Static [WAS: Re: [general] some ideas & request for   comments (LONG)]
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>> Also, the path for the search for the .dll files
>> could be modified to search in more logical places such as /bin, /usr/bin,
>> /usr/local/bin and the windows system directory so that the symlinks wouldn't
>> be needed.
>
>Ugh. This would just confuse everybody. And I doubt the binutils or gcc
>guys would ever accept a patch of this nature.
>
>--Chuck

I agree to that; Nothing is worse than to find out that you have linked to that
5 years old library that happens to sleep arround somewhere on your machine. 

This gets even worse if you think about the fact that there always could be a
completely different dll in the windows dir that happens to have the same name
as a library I want to link to. My NT-Machine, for example has it's own version
of sendmail.dll in winnt\system32.

Perhaps we should be more strict:

Instead of allowing 

foo.dll.a libfoo.dll.a foo.dll libfoo.dll libfoo.a

we could restrict this to:

libfoo.dll.a libfoo.dll libfoo.a

I checked my machine, there are no NT-Dll's starting with lib-prefix; besides
that things are even more transparent because then using -lfoo has nearly the
same effect as under unix, libs names foo.dll will be ignored.

Till then,

Michael