Re: cyg/lib DLL naming

[Igor Pechtchanski <pechtcha at cs dot nyu dot edu>]

On Wed, 15 Jun 2005, Peciva Jan wrote:

> >> >> our cross-platform application is working on Linux and Windows but
> >> >> not on Cygwin when X are installed. The problem has been tracked down
> >> >> and as a result: What is the reason for naming
> >> >> /usr/X11R6/bin/libfreetype.dll and not cygfreetype.dll ?
> >> >
> >> > This is an old library from the XFree86-dll-compat package and the
> >> > package is only required by program which have not been updated to the
> >> > naming structure which is used for over year now.
> >>
> >> Thanks for the response. I am glad that cyg prefix is planned to be used
> >> everywhere. However, can you give me some hints when will be the package
> >> or the DLL probably removed?
> >
> > Why do you care?  It's a *compatibility* library, there for *old*
> > executables. If you link with freetype now, the new DLLs should be used
> > automatically.
>
> I think, you are missing the point. This compatibility library breaks the
> compatibility with non-cygwin world (see the previous discussion).

No, I believe *you* are missing the point.  As AGO pointed out, searching
for libfreetype.dll is non-portable, dangerous, and silly.  If you wish to
use freetype, why not link with an appropriate import library and let it
pick up the known DLL?  If you want to do this conditionally, you could
even create a bridge DLL, and load *that* via the dlopen() calls.

> Therefore, I was asking, WHY is it prefixed lib* and not cyg*

Because that was the convention the maintainer chose at the time.

> and WHEN will it be removed to get this bug fixed.

Probably never.  Again, *this is not a bug*.  If this breaks your
application, it's a bug in your application, which is non-portable and
will need to be fixed.

> Anyway, I know, that it may take some time to get the things happen.

An indefinite amount of time.  Even if TeXmacs gets recompiled to use the
newer libfreetype packages, the compatibility library will probably still
be around, since many unofficial packages may depend on it as well.  It
won't be installed by default, but you can't count on any particular
machine not having that DLL.

> I should probably consider some nasty workarounds.

Yes, you should.  Except, as I suggested above, they need not be
particularly nasty.
	Igor
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