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From: Chris Faylor <cgf AT cygnus DOT com>
Date: Thu, 31 Aug 2000 14:46:34 -0400
To: cygwin AT sources DOT redhat DOT com
Subject: Re: DLL naming conventions
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In-Reply-To: <14766.41758.390000.471560@gargle.gargle.HOWL>; from tml@iki.fi on Thu, Aug 31, 2000 at 09:25:34PM +0300

On Thu, Aug 31, 2000 at 09:25:34PM +0300, Tor Lillqvist wrote:
>Paul Sokolovsky writes:
> > GIMP's stupid shrink-wrapped installer drop its to
> > windows/system).
>
>No it doesn't. (It did at some point, a long time ago.) Currently it
>puts the DLLs in \Program Files\Common Files\GNU.
>
>Currently the GIMP for Windows does not use DLLs for the JPEG, Zlib or
>TIFF libraries, precisely because of the lack of consensus in naming
>etc. And if there is anything to learn from this discussion, it is
>that it is best to stick to static libraries in the future, too...
>
>One point that has not been brought up here is that it is not enough
>that some library's API is stable, like for instance zlib. The ABI
>must also be identical in order to be able to share the same DLL
>between applications from different sources. With this I am thinking
>of struct packing issues, i.e. whether gcc compilations use
>-fnative-struct (MSVC-compatible bitfield packing) or not.
>
>Sorry that this is mostly off-topic to the cygwin list.

I actually think that this is quite on topic for this discussion.

I guess the one thing that reading this mailing list for three
years has showed me is that any change is expensive.  I never would
have thought that something like having the installer default to
putting cygwin stuff in its own directory would have caused
people's heads to explode but I was obviously naive.

This reaction to change has made me very reluctant to consider
user visible changes to cygwin since I can easily imagine the
onslaught of "newbies" looking for libz.dll.

Maybe you're right and we are starting to rely too much on DLLs for
things that are clearly established and relatively static (no pun
intended) like zlib.  The benefit to shared libraries is that
you're sharing a common code base among many applications, making
upgrading due to bugs easier.  Also, if multiple programs are
using shared libraries then there should be a reduction in load
times.

I'm not sure that these benefits outweigh the difficulties that
are being raised.

cgf

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