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Date: Tue, 07 Apr 2009 00:12:55 +0100
From: Dave Korn <dave DOT korn DOT cygwin AT googlemail DOT com>
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Subject: Re: All clear [was Re: [1.7]: For the love of god, don't update!]
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Christopher Faylor wrote:
> On Mon, Apr 06, 2009 at 08:08:33PM +0200, Corinna Vinschen wrote:
>> On Apr  6 13:33, Christopher Faylor wrote:
>>> On Mon, Apr 06, 2009 at 06:29:43PM +0200, Corinna Vinschen wrote:
>>>> Wouldn't it help if libc.a, libm.a etc. wouldn't export any symbols at
>>>> all?  I mean, eventually there's libcygwin.a linked in which satisfies
>>>> all of the requested symbols.  What would break if the secondary libs
>>>> pointing to cygwin1.dll would be stubs?
>>> We rehashed all of this years ago.  IIRC, some configuration scripts
>>> actually look for symbols explicitly in the libraries.
>> Hmm, too bad.  So it was a naive thought.
> 
> I think I had the same thought while resisting the whole concept of
> speclib.
> 
> Maybe I should have resisted harder.

  I think there's a strong argument that those configuation scripts are doing
a very wrong thing in that they're trying to second-guess internal
implementation details of the operating environment.  If you remember, was
there a good reason why they couldn't answer the same questions solely using
link tests?  Grepping through library symbols seems quite fragile when so many
standard C library functions are permitted to be implemented as macros.

    cheers,
      DaveK


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