Windows ld bug/RFE with MSVC .libs

[Greg Couch]

The MinGW folks said to bug you guys at binutils, so here goes :-).

ld on Windows will successfully find exported functions in a Microsoft
Visual C++, MSVC, generated .lib to link against, but not exported
"DATA".  So ld is unable to link to third-party libraries generated by
MSVC.  I consider this behavior a bug as there is no workaround
possible with the utilities provided (please let me know if I'm wrong).

Either ld should not link against .lib's at all and a utility should
be provided to generate a .a from a .lib or ld should link against
all of the .lib.

For the record, I found a workaround, pexports -- a GPL'd program that
reads a .dll and generates a .def file (that dlltool can convert to
a .a) -- <http://starship.python.net/crew/kernr/mingw32/pexports-0.42h.zip>.
Please encorporate its magic into ld/nm.  (And it would be even better if
-lname would look for name.lib in addition to libname.a.)

        Thanks for your attention,

        Greg Couch
        UCSF Computer Graphics Lab
        address@hidden