Re: Avoid gawkextlib as a separate shared library (was: MinGw port of gawkextlib)

[Andrew J. Schorr]

On Tue, May 17, 2022 at 10:32:16AM +0200, Manuel Collado wrote:
> IIRC, there have been other people confused about the role of
> gawkexlib as a required DLL. In part due to the name coincidence
> among this base library and the whole gawkwextlib project. And the
> fact that the directory of the gawkextlib module is named just /lib.
> And not clear what exactly is the role of this base module.
> 
> And I vaguely remember another install issue on MinGw. The file
> gawkextlib-0.dll need to be in the \bin directory to run
> gawk+some-extension, and also need to be in \lib to build
> some-extension. Otherwise make fails to locate gawkextlib as a
> shared library at the link phase, and offer to link it statically.
> 
> This issue has been discussed long time ago. My proposal was to move
> the stuff in /lib to /shared, and add strhash.{c,o} and
> varinit.{c.o} to the lists of files required by some extensions.
> I.e., link this stuff statically instead of a shared library.
> 
> Both strhash and varinit are small. Is it really convenient to avoid
> duplicating this small code in the extensions that require them? I
> guess few people will install a bunch of extensions all of them
> requiring all the content of gawkextlib.
> 
> Is it ok to discuss the issue again?

As you can tell, I don't know too much about how MinGW works. Eli says
the existing setup works OK, because libtool knows what to do. Are you 
finding otherwise? It sounds like we may never have a perfect solution
that can support every possible MinGW configuration, but if we can get
something that works some of the time for some people, that may be all
we can hope for.

The advantage of shared libraries is that bugs can be patched and libraries
upgraded without having to rebuild and reinstall all packages that depend
on them. I'd rather not change the whole setup based on some theoretical
problems that aren't occurring in real life.

I think the real answer here is to create a "gawkext" tool and then
wait for bug reports. We can't anticipate everything that will go wrong,
it seems, because people may have all sorts of strange setups.

Regards,
Andy