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Re: Questions about missing DLLs and program behvior, and symlinks to DLLs


Ray Simard wrote:
Christopher Faylor wrote:
On Sun, Jan 11, 2009 at 08:28:25PM -0800, rhs.cygwin@sylvan-glade.com wrote:
Hello! I haven't been able to find anything about this in the archives.
...

shows, programs simply exit silently and unceremoniously when that happens.
That is fixed in Cygwin 1.7.x.

Good news.
Second, symlinking to DLLs doesn't enable programs to find them, as is
also shown below.
Right.  Symlinks are a Cygwin invention.  Cygwin doesn't start running
until after DLLs are loaded.  So, since Windows does not know about Cygwin
symlinks there is no way that they can be used to symlink DLLs.

True; they are .lnk files with a special comment, IIRC. I'd just like to make sure I understand this. Suppose I compile bar.dll and libbar.dll.a, and then foo.exe with -lbar.dll, so it uses that DLL, and these are compiled entirely within the Cygwin environment (thus using Cygwin's gcc and related tools). I then launch it from the command line of a bash shell running in a Cygwin xterm. What I think you're saying is that there there is something that foo.exe needs to do before it can understand Cygwin symlinks, and that something is done sometime *after* it needs to actually load bar.dll, which prevents it from finding bar.dll if the DLL's name is actually bar-froob.dll and bar.dll is a symlink to it. Is that the idea?

Ah, not quite. DLLs are loaded by the O/S, not Cygwin. So if the O/S can't find the DLL referenced, it won't load it. Since the O/S doesn't know that Cygwin's bar.dll.lnk is a symbolic link to bar.dll, it's not going to find bar.dll.

If so, then it's just a matter of putting the real DLLs in the paths
Windoze searches for them.  Symlinks would be nice, but if you can't,
you can't.

Right.


--
Larry Hall                              http://www.rfk.com
RFK Partners, Inc.                      (508) 893-9779 - RFK Office
216 Dalton Rd.                          (508) 893-9889 - FAX
Holliston, MA 01746

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A: Yes.
> Q: Are you sure?
>> A: Because it reverses the logical flow of conversation.
>>> Q: Why is top posting annoying in email?

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