From: ptkwt@...1.aracnet.com (Phil Tomson)
Date: 2001-10-04T09:26:28+09:00
Subject: [ruby-talk:22043] Re: Flogging a live Window

In article <9pg6of$dv0$1@wanadoo.fr>,
Benoit Cerrina <benoit.cerrina@writeme.com> wrote:
>
>> As I said earlier in the thread, what we really need to do right now is to
>> identify problems which we believe are being caused by cygwin and file
>> some bugs with the cygwin folks - that, it seems to me, is our best
>> short-term solution.
>>
>> Phil
>>
>Well one problem is the different versions of the cygwin dll, as you may
>know,
>although windows has a prefered search strategy for dll (first the dir where
>the
>exe is then the PATH env var) once a dll with a given name is loaded it
>doesn't
>attempt to reload it, this means that two apps wich only work with two
>different
>versions of a dll (with the same name) cannot cohabit in the same machine if
>they
>were correctly installed (did not copy their dll all other the system) the
>first one
>which is launched will get to pick the dll in its dir and the next one will
>be out of
>luck...
>I've had this exact problem with the cygwin dll coming with the ruby install
>a while
>back, if I had launched a ruby script, programs coming with the cygwin
>distribution
>would suddenly repport dynamic linking errors.

That's not really a cygwin problem per se.  It's more of a problem with 
how Windows handles dll's.  Are there ways that that the Ruby for Windows 
installer could handle this (or at least help to mitigate the problem) 
like checking to see if there is another cygwin dll that is already on the 
system?

>Also I don't know if any of you has managed to run a gtk sample from the
>cygwin
>distribution, well I haven't and it work like a charm with the mingw32
>distribution.

So are you saying that with mingw you just statically link the ruby.exe to 
mingw (no dll's).

Phil