Re: Symlinks from Tools to Applications

[Nicola Pero]

>> The reason I proposed this was to overcome the limitation of needing an
>> application's dll's to be in the search path when the application is
>> loaded.
>
> Yes ... but the standard windows mechanism for doing this is to use  
> the registry ... (HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows 
> \CurrentVersion\App Paths) which solves the problem of automatically  
> locating the dlls efficiently and simply.

What about just installing gnustep-base.dll into the Windows system directory ?
Then it would be automatically found with no need for registry entries (the
registry is a nightmare)! :-)

But the real issue is that we need to start versioning DLLs.

In fact, versioning looks like being the really hard problem, because under 
Windows it's a total mess. :-(

The only real solution I can think of is going the Unix way and use the filename
to version things, so we'd have Renaissance-0_8.dll and Renaissance-0_9.dll 
and your program would be linked to one of the two, including the version 
number, 
to avoid conflicts.

Presumably on MinGW gnustep-make could automatically create versioned library
names such as Renaissace-0_8.dll and Renaissance-0_8.a ?  And then convert 
-lRenaissance into -lRenaissace-0_8 when preparing the link commands on Windows 
?

I think I can make that work efficiently if there is some agreement that it is 
the way we want to manage versioning on MinGW.

Thanks