Subject: Re: DLL naming conventions
From: Chris Faylor <[email-masked]>
To: Chris Faylor <[email-masked]>
Cc: [email-masked]
Date: Thu, 31 Aug 2000 11:53:26 -0400

On Thu, Aug 31, 2000 at 02:14:56PM +0300, Paul Sokolovsky wrote:
>From: Paul Sokolovsky <[email-masked]>
>Chris Faylor <[email-masked]> wrote:
>CF> Of course, on reflection, the cygwin project doesn't really have to
>CF> change at all.
>
>Yes! Who here proposes to change something?  Blame him, beat him, cut
>him! But we, as cicvilized people, let's talk about conventions, *not*
>about changing anything, ok?

If we're going to talk about technical issues, how about leaving out
incomprehensible hyperbole?

>CF> All of these other "GNU targets" which came along after
>CF> cygwin was well established, and benefitted from years of cygwin
>CF> development, should probably be making naming concessions if it is a
>CF> problem.
>
>    Exactly! I knew you'll recommend that, so I'm going to submit
>patch to libtool which will use different naming convention for
>GNU/Win32 target I maintain. But not everyone so reflective as me, and
>there're at least two other targets cygwin and mingw32. Ok, we'll
>leave rock-solid cygwin aside. But what about poor mingw32? Chris, I
>understand your position: that's not cygwin problem. But what if you,
>maintainer of Cygwin, mother of all GNU-Win32 targets, considered that
>it is problem of - not Cygwin - whole GNU-Win32? Then, you might
>consider doing something. If you'd consider it, you might come with
>following thought: "Hey, but we already using 'cyg' prefix for some libs.

The reason that we use "cyg" on the tcl libs is that they contain local
cygwin mods, making those DLLs different from the ones already
distributed by Scriptics.

I think it is unlikely that a person will be attempting to use both the
cygwin and mingw libpng DLLs at the same time and have absolutely no
desire to engage in a massive DLL renaming campaign, especially given
the attendant confusion that will be a guaranteed result.

>At the same time, GNU has convention of prefixing libraries with
>'lib'.

This is a longstanding *UNIX* convention.  It's not a GNU convention.

>Let's recommend for cygwin use prefix 'cyg' instead (for *dlls
>only*) - it is consistent with existing practise. As for mingw32,
>we'll leave it 'lib' - after all, it's the most native GNU-Win32
>target, let it use defualt conventions. All other, being
>superstructures on win32, to use distinguishable naming scheme".

If every package maintainer wants to follow this (to me) ill-considered
plan, that's fine.  Just as long as I don't have to support it.

IMO, cygwin is supposed to be UNIX for Windows.  If people are looking
for libraries, they don't look for 'cygreadline.dll' they look for
'libreadline.dll'.

>CF> Expecting cygwin to change its conventions is just a tad
>CF> bit arrogant, don't you think?
>
>Chris, you often ask strange questions.  If, I say - if, someone would
>propose to change its conventions, I'd first listen one's reasoning
>before making my opinion whether it is arrogant or not.  But what
>relation this has to our present conversation?

I was under the impression that you'd already submitted your reasoning.
Apparently you're having some kind of problems with library versioning
with your own project so your solution is to change cygwin's usages.
I'm sure that it must have occurred to you that cygwin has been using
the same conventions for years and that suddenly changing things now
will lead to confusion.  I don't see any plan for dealing with the
confusion, however.

I assume that if your plan is implemented you'll just disappear from
this mailing list and leave others to deal with the fallout.

Perhaps this assumption is invalid, but I don't see you answering any
questions here on a day-to-day basis.

However, it's all moot.  The base cygwin release that I control is
not going to change any of its naming conventions.  If all of the
other contributors want to adopt a new plan, that's fine with me.
Isn't free software wonderful?

However, I will again state that I don't think that any change is
necessary.

cgf

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