Cygwin List O' Issues...

[Charles Wilson]

This is the first of four messages.  There are three significant issues 
with regards to libtool support on cygwin, even after tonight's 
inclusion of the patches I submitted.  I will describe these problems 
briefly here, and then start three new subthreads that more completely 
describe the problems -- complete with examples!

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1. C++ (actually, all tags except C) is broken.  This is because the 
non-C tags extract the list of runtime stdlibs from the compiler, and 
then explicitly add them to the link command (while using -nostdlibs). 
This has the effect of requiring that the runtime libs satisfy the "is 
it dynamic?" check in $file_magic_cmd.

Since the cygwin gcc/g++/g77 compiler suite provides only static 
versions of libgcc, libstdc++, libsupc++, libg2c, etc, this means that 
ALL shared libs written in those languages fail to build.  (Strangely, 
the C tag does NOT behave this way.  Inconsistency...)  But the lack of 
a shared version of the runtime libs should NOT preclude building DLLs 
on windows -- and in fact, it probably shouldn't preclude them on Linux 
or Solaris, either (shared libs containing non-PIC runtime code just 
runs a little slower, that's all).

This bug can also affect other platforms (but most platforms' compiler 
suite supply shared versions of the runtime libs, so the behavior is not 
as visible).

-------------------------
2. 'make install DESTDIR=' fails (or relinks to an old version of a 
dependent lib) when the project contains dependent libraries.

This bug affects all platforms.

-------------------------
3. relinking .exe's.  Over and over and over and over.  This doesn't 
really cause project builds to FAIL, but it is HIGHLY annoying -- and 
has the possibility of an infinite dependency loop.

This bug is win32-platform (cygwin, mingw, pw, ...) specific.
-------------------------

Unfortunately, I really have no idea how to fix these problems -- but I 
thought I'd bring them up here, just in case somebody else had a bright 
idea.  And I'd *really* like to see them corrected before 1.5 is 
released. :-)

Three more messages follow, one for each of the three problems.  Please 
reply to those messages, not this one.

Thanks,
Chuck