Re: install mingwm10.dll

[Bob Rossi]

On Thu, Mar 27, 2008 at 11:51:31PM +0100, Ralf Wildenhues wrote:
> Hi Bob,
> 
> * Bob Rossi wrote on Thu, Mar 27, 2008 at 06:55:26PM CET:
> > On Wed, Mar 26, 2008 at 03:28:26PM -0400, Bob Rossi wrote:
> > > 
> > > I want to install mingwm10.dll, since my program requires it. I'm trying
> > > to figure out the best way to do this. The dll lives in /c/mingw/bin.
> > > 
> > > Would
> > >   bin_DATA=/c/mingw/bin/mingwm10.dll
> > > make the most sense? Any suggestions?
> 
> > I switched over to linux, and got an example to work like this,
> >   bin_SCRIPTS = /usr/lib/libglib-2.0.so
> > Is this a stupid thing to do?
> 
> Erm, yes.  Even apart from the fact that such a hard-coded path is
> pretty unportable.
> 
> > Is there a better solution?
> 
> I'm not sure what you want to do.  You want
>   make install
> 
> to copy /c/mingw/bin/mingwm10.dll to /usr/local/bin/mingwm10.dll?

I want to copy /c/mingw/bin/mingwm10.dll to my bin dir yes. After I do
the make install, I will then use something like NSIS to take the
install dir and make some sort of installation package for windows.

> Why in the world would you want to do that?  And if you really want
> to copy that file somewhere, why do you not just keep it as part of
> your distribution tarball?

The problem is, you can't run a mingw application on windows that
does not have mingwm10.dll installed if the mingw application uses
threads and exceptions.

> And yes, apart from it looking like a weird thing to try in the first
> place, here's a bunch more reasons against the above:

I hope it doesn't seem wierd now. I have to give the user the
mingwm10.dll, so, I think it should be installed.

> - on my w32 system, mingwm10.dll lives in another place (in fact, it
>   happens not to, but it easily could),

I know, I don't know what to do about this, besides write a macro to
find it, that will come next if needs be.

> - on my GNU/Linux, the library does not exist, but there is an import
>   library libmingw32.a which I think can be linked against,

My linux version of this program does not need the library, as I simply
use the normal gcc, not the mingw version. Perhaps the version on linux
you are looking for is for cross compiling?

> - *_DATA does not set execute permissions on installed files (I think
>   this is less of a problem for w32 than for unixes, but may still be
>   for cross compilation?),

OK, I'm not using data anymore.

> - *_SCRIPTS are installed after *_PROGRAMS are installed (or even
>   concurrently with parallel make), so if a program needs the freshly
>   installed library, that can break,
> - install-strip won't work on that library.
> 
> I agree that Automake does not provide a good method, only relying on
> documented interfaces, which can overcome all these issues.

Thank you very much for this description, it was really helpful. I'm
currently using the bin_SCRIPTS solution. It seems to work for now.

Thanks again,
Bob Rossi