Re: cyg/lib DLL naming

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

On Thu, 16 Jun 2005, Peciva Jan wrote:

> > As AGO pointed out, searching for libfreetype.dll is non-portable,
> > dangerous, and silly.
>
> Not me, who is doing that, but one large SW open-source library.
> Therefore it is clear, that it have to link with other libraries in the
> system that it is using.

Right, but that doesn't make the current approach any less dangerous,
non-portable, or silly.  You may want to contact the authors of Coin and
let the know about this bug in their code.

> Things turned in to the OS ideas. And I am not interrested in them, I
> want to simply fix the incompatibility between Coin library and Cygwin.

Not quite.  These are dynamic loading ideas.  Building a bridge DLL is
hardly an OS-level thing.

However, I can see your problem, as the code to look up the freetype DLL
is probably hard-wired into Coin, and there isn't much you can do about
it.  As you mentioned, you could use some nasty workarounds (like
providing your own stub libfreetype.dll in your application directory,
which should be found first, and which links to the appropriate freetype
DLL), but eventually Coin should be fixed.

> Coin library is important for us, because we are using it for
> visualization on our university (we are not the authors of the library).
>
> >> 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. [...]
>
> :-)
>
> If I skip all offensive words, I have to thank you for the discussion.

You're welcome.  However, my profanity filter is overheating while trying
to find any offensive words in my previous message.  Would you mind
letting me know what they were, so that I could add them to the filter?

Or do you mean "If I skip all offensive words that come to mind"? :-)

> Let me give you the last question:
> If I understand it correctly, I can not link with cygwin based DLLs
> without a special handling code. Am I true?

In this context (linking from a pure Win32 application), yes, you need to
put some initialization code in (with the latest snapshot, that is).

A rejoinder question, though: if you're buidling a native Win32
application, why not use the native build of freetype as well?
	Igor
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