Re: Avoid gawkextlib as a separate shared library

[Manuel Collado]

El 18/05/2022 a las 13:40, Andrew J. Schorr escribió:
> On Wed, May 18, 2022 at 11:11:13AM +0200, Manuel Collado wrote:
> > My point is to simplify building gawkextlib extensions from source
> > distribution tarballs. If they need libgawkextlib-0.dll. Possible
> > alternatives:
> > [...]
> > Does any of those alternatives make sense? How can they compare
> > w.r.t. the effort required to implement?
>
> It's difficult to discuss this sensibly without understanding the current
> challenges of MinGW installation. Eli says that libtool works correctly with
> the current setup, whereas you say that you had to copy libgawkextlib-0.dll
> to a different spot to get things to work. Is it possible to sort out this
> issue before discussing what needs to be changed to support MinGW better?

I've revised what I did last year. The issue seems to be that the gcc 
linker of my installed MinGW distribution needs access to both 
gawkextlib-0.dll and libgawkextlib.dll.a. But the current setup lets the 
linker to only look at the /lib directory of the installation tree. And 
gawkextlib-0.dll gets installed in /bin.

Copying gawkextlib-0.dll to /lib is a dirty hack. A cleaner solution was 
to patch gawkext.m4 as follows:

diff --git a/shared/gawkext.m4 b/shared/gawkext.m4
index 7abc165..22325b0 100644
--- a/shared/gawkext.m4
+++ b/shared/gawkext.m4
@@ -58,7 +58,7 @@ AC_ARG_WITH(gawkextlib,
        [
                # some platforms use lib64 and others use lib
                wldfound=0
-               for wldir in "$withval"/lib* ; do
+               for wldir in "$withval"/bin "$withval"/lib* ; do
                        if test -d "$wldir"; then
                                LDFLAGS="-L${wldir} ${LDFLAGS}"
                                AC_SUBST([GAWKEXTLIBDIR],"$wldir")

Don't know if other gcc distributions for Windows also require a similar 
change. Perhaps Eli is using Msys2 plus its MinGW32 subsystem instead of 
my (older) MinGW+Msys.

HTH. Regards.
--
Manuel Collado - http://mcollado.z15.es