[Zlib-devel] [PATCH] mingw zlib import library name

[John Bowler]

From: Enrico Weigelt
> John Bowler 
>> In other words gentoo patches the implib name from libzdll.a to libz.dll.a
>>on mingw.  This is done so that other packages, which invariably use '-lz',
>>do actually link to the DLL
>Is this an Gentoo-specific issue or generic ?

Generic, quite apart from Kalev Lember's observation that the same thing is done on Fedora, it is a general convention that the package provider, not the package user, chooses whether a package library is provided as a DLL or statically.

I don't know of another package where the static and dynamic libraries are built under two distinct names.  I don't know of any package that links to -lzdll and autotools don't seem to support it (which, surely, makes it a non-starter?)

Actually... I go further.  I don't know *any* package, including zlib, where this is done - I just took a look at my own mingw build system and I see *I* had to install zlib as libz.dll.a while testing libpng (otherwise it simply didn't work - libpng doesn't know anything about -lzdll).  When I asked about this at least one person said that he or she renamed it too.

Calling the implib libzdll.a is just making work for everyone else.

John Bowler <jbowler at acm.org>