Avoid gawkextlib as a separate shared library (was: MinGw port of gawkextlib)

[Manuel Collado]

El 16/05/2022 a las 20:51, Andrew J. Schorr escribió:
> On Mon, May 16, 2022 at 08:59:45PM +0300, Eli Zaretskii wrote:
> > But if I download the gawk-mpfr-NN.MM.tar.gz tarball, I don't get that
> > top-level README, do I?
>
> You don't. But how would you download it without seeing the top-level README
> that's displayed on the file download page? I guess you could fail to read
> it if you were in a rush. I'm not aware of anybody's being in a rush to
> download gawkextlib extensions.

IIRC, there have been other people confused about the role of gawkexlib 
as a required DLL. In part due to the name coincidence among this base 
library and the whole gawkwextlib project. And the fact that the 
directory of the gawkextlib module is named just /lib. And not clear 
what exactly is the role of this base module.

And I vaguely remember another install issue on MinGw. The file 
gawkextlib-0.dll need to be in the \bin directory to run 
gawk+some-extension, and also need to be in \lib to build 
some-extension. Otherwise make fails to locate gawkextlib as a shared 
library at the link phase, and offer to link it statically.

This issue has been discussed long time ago. My proposal was to move the 
stuff in /lib to /shared, and add strhash.{c,o} and varinit.{c.o} to the 
lists of files required by some extensions. I.e., link this stuff 
statically instead of a shared library.

Both strhash and varinit are small. Is it really convenient to avoid 
duplicating this small code in the extensions that require them? I guess 
few people will install a bunch of extensions all of them requiring all 
the content of gawkextlib.

Is it ok to discuss the issue again?

Regards.
--
Manuel Collado - http://mcollado.z15.es