Re: Questions about missing DLLs and program behvior, and symlinks to DLLs (also, a small setup recommendation)

[Christopher Faylor <cgf-use-the-mailinglist-please at cygwin dot com>]

On Sun, Jan 11, 2009 at 08:28:25PM -0800, rhs.cygwin@sylvan-glade.com wrote:
>Hello!  I haven't been able to find anything about this in the archives.
>
>I recently decided to replace my old Cygwin installation with a new,
>fresh one, so everything should be up-to-date here.  [That's my
>recommendation: perhaps a way to make it easier to install fresh; it was
>necessary to rename both the old Cywin installation and the location of
>the downloaded installation packages to keep setup from finding them.]
>
>The DLL questions are regarding programs compiled within Cygwin: when a
>program can't find a DLL, one expects some sort of error message to that
>effect, and which would indicate the DLL in question. As my demo below
>shows, programs simply exit silently and unceremoniously when that happens.

That is fixed in Cygwin 1.7.x.

>Second, symlinking to DLLs doesn't enable programs to find them, as is
>also shown below.

Right.  Symlinks are a Cygwin invention.  Cygwin doesn't start running
until after DLLs are loaded.  So, since Windows does not know about Cygwin
symlinks there is no way that they can be used to symlink DLLs.

cgf

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