John Femiani wrote:
Why not? What if shared & import libraries (in general) were placed in a different folder?
Yes, this would obviously work. But this would require a change of the layout for all other compilers too. It is just that boost has decided on the naming convention some time ago. ...
WRT a concrete examples; I guess my problem was not convincing enough. We shall see if somebody else complains soon. I think that
$ g++ foo.cpp -dn -lxyz
fails to locate the static lib on windows with the current names, which seems like a bug.
Sorry, if this is intended as an example what is -dn used for then:
-dn -fdump-rtl-rnreg Dump after register renumbering, to file.147r.rnreg.
I cannot easily see how this flag affects our discussion. Then in your example you do not specify if you want the static or the dynamic lib. You just say: take whichever is found in the path, yes?
Requiring -llibxyz works but has a smell,
Yes the smell of working on windows.
and it gets smellier when you try do it from SCons (I wonder what happens with CMake?)
I don't know enough of SCons: does this mean SCons cannot handle library naming that is common on windows?
The worst thing is that -lxyz works, it just doesn't do what you think.
So please tell me what I think ;-) Btw.: This is why I tried to read the manpage about gcc and ld very carefully to understand link search order. (I posted the summary already in a related post.)
At the least, _I_ did not expect the lib would be necessary, and nor did the build tool I used, and if I had not caught it then I would have only found out about my problem when I tried to install my program on a new machine without the dll (too late IMO).
So far you have not come up with a alternative suggestion that would 1) work 2) do what you expect 3) is compatible with current boost usage. 4) does not break my builds Btw.: As I started to use mingw with boost it didn't work at all. What I did: learned to understand boost-build, learned to understand ld and mingw and came up with a solution after having it discussed with the writer of boost-build. Well my solution surely is not the only one possible, and I am sorry if it introduced unmanageable problems for you. But then this is open source: what hinders you to make it better? Of course I would not be very happy if you break something for everybody else (including me ;-) Roland -- _________________________________________ _ _ | Roland Schwarz |_)(_ | aka. speedsnail | \__) | mailto:roland.schwarz@chello.at ________| http://www.blackspace.at