Re: Patches for Mingw/MSYS

[heromyth]

Charles Wilson wrote:
> First, tho, the proposed change should NOT be committed.  Since I'm the 
> one who created the exe wrapper system, maybe I should explain why it's 
> there: to fix the "relink on install" problem.  Remember when 'make 
> install' would rebuild every executable (sometimes multiple times), 
> because the make target was foo$(EXE) but the only prog that existed 
> where make could see it was the shell script wrapper foo?
>
> That's why libtool, on Windows platforms, creates an executable wrapper 
> named ./foo$(EXE) -- to ensure that make will not try to rebuild the 
> "real" executable unless it really needs to.   The exe-wrapper has a 
> simple job: it runs the shell script wrapper foo, which in turn sets up 
> the environment so that the REAL exe, .libs/foo.exe (or sometimes 
> ..libs/foo-lt.exe), can operate properly (find its DLLs, etc).
>
> Yes, it's cumbersome and overly complicated -- but we can't dispense 
> with the shell script wrapper, because there are times when libtool 
> itself needs to parse the CONTENTS of that wrapper.  If ALL we had were 
> the exe-wrapper, then libtool wouldn't be able to do that.  So, on 
> Windows, we have both, chained together -- because they solve different 
> problems.

I think I understand what you said. However, the fact is I have solve 
some little problem in Mingw/msys using this patch. For example, without 
this patch, I can't make successful installation with gettext-cvs(I 
configured with --enable-shared), and can't make nobase.test of 
automake-cvs pass.

Sorry for that I haven't test this patch on other platform.