Re: MinGW link against an MS Windows import library

[Bob Friesenhahn]

On Wed, 14 Apr 2004, Bill Jones wrote:

> I have considered this but do not see it as a practical solution.  I do
> not think that it should be the responsibility of every developer to
> make a copy of a file simply because the extension is not what libtool
> likes.  The .lib extension is a valid extension to Windows and it seems
> more appropriate to have libtool conform to that spec under Windows
> (MinGW/Cygwin in particular) as I am sure that this will occur
> frequently.  Thanks for the response.

Is the .lib format really the same as .a?  I suspect not since .a
suggests that the format is Unix ar format.

Bob

> Tim Van Holder wrote:
> > Bill Jones wrote:
> >
> >> So the basic question is how do I specify a static import library with
> >> a *.lib extension to be used by libtool for resolving the symbols
> >> provided by a non-libtool DLL when building a dependent DLL with libtool?
> >
> >
> > The trivial solution is of course to make a copy of the third-party .lib
> > file with a .a extension (the file format is identical anyway).
> > Alternatively, you may be able to create a fresh .a from the DLL using
> > 'dllwrap --implib <dllname> -o <libname>', but it's likely that that
> > won't have all the necessary symbols.
======================================
Bob Friesenhahn
address@hidden
http://www.simplesystems.org/users/bfriesen