Re: Avoid gawkextlib as a separate shared library

[Eli Zaretskii]

> Cc: arnold@skeeve.com, eliz@gnu.org, bug-gawk@gnu.org
> From: Manuel Collado <mcollado2011@gmail.com>
> Date: Wed, 18 May 2022 17:54:22 +0200
> 
> 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.

How can this be?

What version of ld do you have there?  What does "ld --version"
display?  Can you show the output of the gawk-mpfr linking command, if
you add the -v switch to its command line, and remove the DLL from the
lib/ directory, leaving there only the import library?

Also, can you verify that the input library is valid: not an empty
file, in the ar format, and that it includes the __imp__* symbols as
an import library should?  (I suggest to use "nm -A" to see that.)

And finally, what does the command below show?

  nm -A path/to/lib/libgawkextlib.dll.a | fgrep -i .dll

> 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.

No, I use MinGW and MSYS, not MinGW64 and MSYS2.  But that shouldn't
matter: all the flavors of MinGW behave the same in this respect.

Btw, the DLL on my system is called libgawkextlib-0.dll, not
gawkextlib-0.dll.  Could this be part of this puzzle?