Re: Problem and Fix: Missing cygncurses5.dll...

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

<flame on>

Christopher Faylor wrote:

> On Tue, Oct 16, 2001 at 01:47:20PM -0500, Wayne Willcox wrote:
> 
>>On Tue, Oct 16, 2001 at 02:44:54PM -0400, Thomas Chadwick wrote:
>>
>>>Problem Synopsis:
>>>
>>>After updating my existing Cygwin/Xfree86 install with Cygwin's
>>>Setup.exe, I launched XFree86 and tried to bring up an xterm.  However,
>>>I got an error that said, to the effect, "cannot find cygncurses5.dll". 
>>>A little poking around made it apparent that the "upgrade" 


Oh yeah -- gotta love those sarcasm quotation marks.  Yeah, I spent 
several hours -- actually most of a weekend -- creating the new 
package(s).  I solicited comments before and after from the cygwin-apps 
list for several weeks.  I did all this so that I could break your 
installation with a faux "upgrade".

It's not an "upgrade".  It is an *upgrade*.  Most of the improvements 
are not user-visible -- but are incremental towards getting ncurses to 
build *as a dll* OOB.  The previous version differed from the official 
release by a 550k patch.  This one by only 50k.  Better, no?  The FSF 
people might actually accept this patch...

>>>>blew away the
>>>file /bin/cygncurses5.dll and replaced it with /bin/cygncurses6.dll,
>>>hence breaking the xterm build.
>>>
>>>Problem Fix/Work-Around:
>>>
>>>I found that by simply copying /bin/cygncurses6.dll to


Funny, somebody else already suggesting your workaround, and was told 
(by me) that it was the WRONG thing to do.

http://www.cygwin.com/ml/cygwin/2001-10/msg00589.html

Do you honestly think the ncurses maintainer (that is, me) changed the 
DLL name on a whim?  That if only I had been thinking, I wouldn't have 
done that -- and thus the correct fix is to rename it back?

It actually took affirmative effort to change the dll name from ...5 to 
...6 -- surely the maintainer (i.e. me) wouldn't do extra work if there 
wasn't a good reason...

>>>
>>could you have used a sym link... I would think so.
>>


No.  *Windows* searches for DLL's.  *Windows* doesn't understand cygwin 
symlinks (okay, it sorta does now that they are shortcuts -- but the 
windows DLL loader won't follow shortcuts).

Besides, the right thing to do is NOT to trick windows into loading the 
cygncurses6.dll instead of the 5.dll it wants.  6 and 5 are *different*.

Note: this is the last time I will respond to any message on this "problem".

--Chuck