Supplying a patched package

[Rob Arthan]

I have an application that is available for the main UN*X implementations
and uses the OpenMotif library. It currently works fine on Cygwin using
the motif-2.3.6-1 package. I am working on enhancing it to use Unicode
and UTF-8 to display mathematical symbols and this has exposed a bug
in OpenMotif. I have a patch for the bug and have successfully built
the OpenMotif library as a DLL and tested it on Cygwin.

The bug has been reported but the turn-round time for a fix to OpenMotif
is likely to be 6 or 12 months and I don’t how long it will take for it to
get picked up on Cygwin (2.3.6 is 2 versions and 18 months behind the
latest version). So my question is what is the best way to supply my fix to
users on Cygwin in the interim.

Building the DLL seems a bit tricky, so I’d prefer users not to have to
do that. If I supply the DLL, then the simplest thing seems to be just
to include the DLL in a bin folder alongside the executable for my app.
Is that a robust and portable solution? Will I need to build different DLLs
for different architectures or can I safely assume that people running
on a reasonably recent MS Windows installation will only want the x86_64 DLL?

Apologies if the answer should be obvious: I am a reasonably proficient
UN*X programmer, but just a naive end-user feeling my way on MS
Windows. Am I right in inferring from experiments that Cygwin and/or
MS Windows looks for DLLs on the list of folders given $PATH and/or
%PATH% list but has a look in the folder containing the executable that
wants the DLL first?

Cheers,

Rob.


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