[PATCH] PE direct linking to dlls, accept any filename.

[Daniel Jacobowitz]

On Fri, Dec 15, 2006 at 03:45:03PM +0000, Pedro Alves wrote:
> The gdb testsuite in some shared lib tests, builds shared libs with .so 
> or .sl extension uncondicionally,
> and then tries to do a direct link, even on PE platforms (eg:cygwin).  
> That fails to link with current ld.
> I sent a patch there to fix a few cases, by introducing a $SOEXT var in 
> the testsuite.
> But thinking again, I can't see a reason ld doesn't let us do a direct 
> link to a dll with an extension
> other than ".dll" or ".DLL".  The Windows loader is happy to load the 
> dlls, and in fact there are many
> examples of dlls without a ".dll" extension in production.
> 
> The attached patch makes ld be able to direct link any dll without 
> looking at the filename extension.

Sorry I hadn't gotten around to looking at the GDB patches yet.  But,
this is exactly what I wondered when I saw them.  I had foolishly
assumed it was a Windows limitation.  But if you can do this instead,
I like it much better!

-- 
Daniel Jacobowitz
CodeSourcery