Re[4]: libtool shouldn't switch to creating static library if it can't create the shared one under Windows

[Vadim Zeitlin]

On Thu, 16 Jun 2011 19:10:39 -0500 (CDT) Bob Friesenhahn <address@hidden> wrote:

BF> On Fri, 17 Jun 2011, Vadim Zeitlin wrote:
BF> >
BF> > Yes, sorry, I keep forgetting about auto-import feature, I guess I'm just
BF> > too accustomed to the "traditional" Windows way and have trouble accepting
BF> > auto-import magic. It's true that projects using auto-import could live
BF> > with falling back to a static library. But consider that auto-importing is
BF> > relatively new so there should be proportionally few projects using it,
BF> > hence IMHO the risk of breakage remains reasonably small.
BF> 
BF> Most projects using libtool come from Unix/Linux where "auto-import" 
BF> is the default so it can be seen that most projects already depend on 
BF> it

 My personal experience seems to contradict it. Maybe because auto-import
is relatively recent or maybe because most originally Unix projects that
target Windows (meaning not only Cygwin but usually MinGW as well and
sometimes even MSVC) need to fix other Windows-specific issues anyhow and
so do make the relatively small extra effort to add the necessary declspecs
too. Anyhow, this is purely anecdotal and it's going to be hard to find an
objective way of determining whether it's the case.


 A more interesting question is if the current situation with libtool can
be improved because I continue to believe that getting a static library
when you're trying to build a shared one can be very unexpected. And this
can be the case even under Unix where there would be presumably too much
resistance to change the way --disable-static works if it is controversial
even under Windows where I thought it would be "obviously correct".

 So it seems the only solution with any chance of acceptance would be to
add a different option doing what I want, e.g. --enable-shared-only. Or
maybe allow --enable-shared=(yes|no|only)?

 What do you think?
VZ

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