Re: [Mingw-users] library name

[Earnie B. <ea...@us...>]

Quoting Julien Lecomte <ju...@fa...>:

>
> The only caveat I found is that the specs file needs to be reviewed 
> if using `gcc -Wl,-dn' or `gcc -Wl,-dy' (ie, linking only to 
> static/shared libraries)
> The fix is simple: change every occurance of -lfoo to -lfoo.dll if 
> the library had been renamed (eg: libkernel.a to libkernel.dll.a)
>

The system libraries are always a .dll; one can use ``nm'' to discover 
if the library is an import library or static library without too much 
effort.  The .dll.a extention was added at a later date than the start 
of MinGW and we've just not taken an initiative to change the name of 
the libraries.  Changing the name of the libraries would also mean that 
we would need to remove existing libraries with the old name when 
someone performs an upgrade.  That isn't really accomplished easily 
with a tarball so we have decided to leave the name the with just a .a 
extention.

Earnie Boyd

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