Bob Friesenhahn wrote:
I see that more recent versions of cygwin/mingw appear to have made using declspec unnecessary:
http://www.redhat.com/docs/manuals/enterprise/RHEL-4-Manual/gnu-linker/win32.html
I don't know how others would feel about it, but perhaps you could just say "version >= XX of cygwin/mingw binutils are required" and forget about all of these issues.
This assumes that libtool should only support the GCC compiler under Windows. Microsoft, Borland, and others, need not apply. Is there a good reason to rule out all compilers except for GCC?
Sorry, I wasn't aware that anyone used those other compilers with Cygwin or MinGW. No, I'm not recommending that support for those be dropped if they are indeed supported right now.
But there are a number of features in the new binutils that will make supporting gcc easier on Cygwin/MinGW, so for environments where the GNU toolchain is in use, I would still suggest placing minimum version requirements in.
One other annoying gotcha when building with libtool and Win32 is that libtool (at least in the 1.x line) assumed that any lib*.a was a static library, and refused to link it into a DLL. It didn't account for the possibility that the library was actually a DLL import library. Now that the linker can automatically Do The Right thing regardless of what type of library is fed to it, libtool could just use pass_all here. So again, it simplifies the Win32 support if you can assume a recent toolchain.
Right now (1.x), when libtool sees that you're trying to link against a DLL, it calls dlltool to generate a new import library on the fly, and then deletes it when that step completes. It does this each time the DLL is referenced in a build procedure, which is a ton of wasted effort and makes builds much slower than they should be. With a new toolchain you could delete all of the commands for these cases and just let ld link the thing.
Failing that, libtool should include the import library in the install step, and the .la file should list
library_names='libfoo.dll libfoo.dll.a'
so that libtool will use the import library when linking libtool libraries together.
-- -- Howard Chu Chief Architect, Symas Corp. Director, Highland Sun http://www.symas.com http://highlandsun.com/hyc Symas: Premier OpenSource Development and Support
