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

[John Bowler]

From: Enrico Weigelt
>One thing we *could* do is providing to .pc files, one for
>dynamic and one for static - so importing packages can make
>this decision on the pkg-config query.

Generally there is only one .pc file, and inventing a new one has exactly the same problems as inventing a new name for the dynamic library.  (I.e. build scripts assume they know the name of the zlib .pc file - it's zlib.pc - and don't have support for other names.)

-config files support static linking, because -config files have a '--static' option, but it doesn't necessarily do what you might expect; I just checked:

libpng-config --libs
	-lpng15

libpng-config --static --libs
	-lpng15 -lz

(The change is because a static link needs to explicitly add -lz to the command line, whereas the DLL of libpng is explicitly linked itself to zlib.)

In other words the --static option here just gets the correct options if --static is *also* passed to ld.

In general on UNIX systems the choice is all or nothing - it's not possible to cherry pick static libraries.  I've never heard anyone complain about this before but I believe it's possible to work round it by explicitly listing the full archive path name on both UNIX and Windows (but I haven't checked that /usr/lib/libz.a will actually not get mapped to /lib/libz.so, for example.)

John Bowler <jbowler at acm.org>