the negative: Ralf, you keep trying to assume things based on filenames.
Filenames LIE. Whether it is the name of the archive (foo.dll.a) or
the name of an object in the archive (dxxxxxx.o), it's gonna fail -- and
it will fail in EXTREMELY hard-to-track-down ways.
You may be right in this issue, but couldn't the symbol "_dll_iname" doesn't
change in future implementation too ? The important question seems to me like
this: [1] Which is the mostly stable identifier we build on ?
filenames change because evil twisted pesky end-users change them, at
any time, for any reason. The _dll_iname symbol has been in every
DLL/implib I've built in the four (five?) years I've been using cygwin.
The only way that symbol is going to change is if somebody
deliberately changes that particular piece of binutils.