Re: Shared vs Static [WAS: Re: [general] some ideas & request for comments (LONG)]

["Charles S. Wilson" <cwilson at ece dot gatech dot edu>]

> > 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.
> 

Although you could do this when building gcc, by setting
"LIB_PATH"=/bin:/lib:/usr/bin:/usr/lib:/usr/local/bin:/usr/local/lib

Oh, and don't forget that in the future, when ./configure-ing a new
package (say rxvt), you'd *always* have to specify
--x-libraries=/usr/X11R6/bin:/usr/X11R6/lib to override configure's
default of path-to-X/lib.

Unless we got even sneakier, and had gcc munge its lib path at run time: 

foreach component in libsearchpath
  if endswith(compenent, "/lib") then
     newcomponent = copy-of(compenent);
     replace-end(newcomponent, "/lib", "/bin");
     newpath = $newpath:$newcomponent:$component
  fi
done
remove-duplicates($newpath)
libsearchpath = newpath

Double yuck. Violates principle of least surprise. I just think link
libraries should go in ..../lib, not ..../bin. So what if windows
requires the dll's to be in the executable PATH (typically composed of
.../bin-type directories). Cygwin can accomodate that by putting copies
of the dll's in .../lib (BAD) or symlinking (.../lib/foo.dll --->
.../bin/foo.dll).

Mingw (as opposed to cygwin-gcc -mno-cygwin).  Hmmmm. Doesn't have
symlinks. Must think about this some more...but then, I never use mingw
so I'm not qualified; don't know the issues.

--Chuck