dll names on windows

[Bob Rossi]

Hi,

I'm mostly new to libtool, so please be patient if I'm misinformed.

I've recently converted pcre's (http://www.pcre.org/) build
system to use the autotools.

The previous stable version of libtool, pcre-7.0, used to create dll's
on mingw. It would create 
  $ ls .libs/*.dll                                                              
                          
    .libs/pcre.dll  .libs/pcreposix.dll                                         
                            

Now, the new autotools version creates,
  $ ls ../../pcre-7.1-RC4/prefix-shared/bin                                     
                          
  libpcre-0.dll  libpcrecpp-0.dll  libpcreposix-0.dll  pcre-config

I mostly know on unix how this works. This is just a rough overview of
how I think things could work, please correct me if I'm wrong.
Typically there is a major and minor number. The major number is bumped 
on incompatible version changes, and the minor number is bumped on 
compatible version changes. Finally there is a symlink that provides 
just the name of the .a or .so, with only the major version number.

A user has complained that the new filename change, on windows, will 
effect the way they have to load pcre as a plugin. They said that on 
windows it's common to always name the dll simply pcre.dll and then 
provide a coff file, which is metadata describing the version number 
and characteristics of the dll.

My question is, what's the correct way to name these dll's on windows?
What would be an appropriate response to this user?

Finally, here is the version numbering in configure.ac,
  m4_define(libpcre_version, [0:1:0])
  m4_define(libpcreposix_version, [0:0:0])
  m4_define(libpcrecpp_version, [0:0:0])
not sure if that's good or not.

Thanks,
Bob Rossi