RE: [h-e-w] 23.0.60; cygwin1.dll dependency

[Phil Betts]

Jason Rumney wrote on Tuesday, August 19, 2008 2:30 AM::

> Lennart Borgman (gmail) wrote:
>> Now I wonder what to do with the image libraries. This problem is of
>> course not only a problem for Emacs+EmacsW32. The same thing that
>> happened here could happen to anyone using Emacs on ms windows.
> 
> Hence the advice from Cygwin folks not to include Cygwin in the
> system-wide PATH. This can happen with any Windows program that loads
> DLLs that happen to have the same name as Cygwin DLLs, which is common
> with ported software.

No it's not.

IIRC there was a (fairly) recent thread on the cygwin mailing list 
which mentioned that having cygwin in the system path was deprecated.
That was immediately denounced as an urban myth by at least one of the 
main developers.  The current cygwin standard is to call DLLs cygxxx.dll

specifically to avoid this accidentally linkage.  The chance of finding
"ported software" which links to a file called cygfoo.dll is, I would
have thought, vanishingly small.

There IS a cygwin library called libxpm.dll, but that is from the 
XFree86-lib-compat package.  I doubt any current package depends on 
that package, so if that is the XPM library being found by emacs, the 
package could probably be safely uninstalled.


I'm not using Lennart's version of emacs, but I do have a full cygwin 
installation and run the native emacs without problem.  Cygwin's /bin 
and /usr/X11R6/bin directories are in my PATH, and I wouldn't have 
it any other way.  

I think the problem here boils down to this: the name of the XPM 
library shipped with emacs is not the name of the one favoured by the 
setting of image-library-alist.

Some factors that may be making me immune to the problem:

* I'm running this emacs version:
   GNU Emacs 22.1.1 (i386-mingw-nt5.1.2600) of 2007-06-02 on RELEASE

* I have the customization variable inhibit-splash-screen set to t

* My version of emacs comes with libxpm-noX4.dll which appears to be a
mingw compiled equivalent of the library found in the xpm-nox cygwin
package

* I start the native emacs using a shortcut with the working directory
(and therefore the favoured search path for libraries) set to the 
emacs bin directory, which is also where the XPM library lives.

* the xpm entry in the (compiled in) image-library-alist in my version 
of emacs is: (xpm "xpm4.dll" "libXpm-nox4.dll" "libxpm.dll"), which 
means that the cygwin xpm library will never be found.


Phil
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