RE: mingw install directory for shared lib

[Bob Friesenhahn]

On Wed, 9 Jan 2008, Duft Markus wrote:

> Bob Friesenhahn <> wrote:
> > On Tue, 8 Jan 2008, Ralf Wildenhues wrote:
> > > General question before fixing this: on w32, should even plugins have
> > > their DLLs go to $bindir?
>
> Yes, i'd agree to this... ;o) If you try to load a library by yourself,
> you will have to know what you're doing. If the DLL is linked to the
> executable, you have no (easy) way to influence what is done by the
> loader...

Modules should not be linked with an executable.  That would surely be 
bad design and should not be supported.  There should be no need to 
load a module by yourself since libtool offers libltdl which does it 
for you by requesting to load the associated .la file. Regardless, 
loading modules directly is trivially easy under Windows.

> Of course there may still be problems if there are dependencies between
> plugins, that are installed in different directories, since loading one
> plugin will load all libraries this dll is linked to. If those are
> plugins themselves, they will have to be in PATH to be found (or in the
> same directory, etc.). The easiest solution is using parity ;) but thats
> self-advertisement again, sorry...

There should be no dependencies between plugins.  That would surely be 
bad design and should not be supported.  Libtool should be supporting 
portable behavior.  If the user does not desire to implement portable 
behavior, then there is little value to using libtool or libltdl.

The portable definition for windows should be:

library - Executables (usually) link directly with libraries and when 
the library is a DLL it should be installed in the executable search 
path, and (ideally) be in the same 'bin' directory as the dependent 
executables.

module - Modules are only loaded via an explicit loading mechanism 
(e.g. Windows LoadLibrary() or libltdl.  Modules may depend on 
libraries (see above) but should not depend on other modules.  Since 
modules are explicitly loaded, they may be installed in an 
application-specific lib directory (just like for Unix).

Bob
======================================
Bob Friesenhahn
address@hidden, http://www.simplesystems.org/users/bfriesen/
GraphicsMagick Maintainer,    http://www.GraphicsMagick.org/