Observation for ALL maintainers who provide dlls (was Re: question for perl maintainer)

[Charles Wilson]

Gerrit P. Haase wrote:

> Doesn't libtool always defines --image-base when building a DLL, or is
> this only with ancient libtool versions?

only ancient versions did this.  Versions of libtool that are merely 
immensely old defined '--enable-auto-image-base'.  No version in the 
lasts three years or so defined either flag.

The ancient-to-old transition of --image-base=FIXED to 
--enable-auto-image-base makes sense.  But the old-to-recent transition, 
removing the --enable-auto-image-base flag entirely, doesn't.  I'm not 
sure why that was done.

I vaguely remember somebody more knowledgeable (Danny?  cgf?  Mumit?) 
than I suggesting that --e-a-i-b was a bad default choice -- but I don't 
remember who or why, and I can't find it in the archives.

For what it's worth, there was a recent patch to libtool-CVS-HEAD to 
turn 'on' --enable-auto-image-base for mingw.

--
Chuck

P.S. I have no strong feelings on this issue, other than my vague 
recollection above, so I'll go along with the consensus when one 
emerges.  However, I'm not going to (a) change my build procedures PRIOR 
to that consensus, nor (b) delay the release of any DLL-providing 
packages until one emerges.  Hence, my release yesterday of non-e-a-i-b 
DLLs for zlib & bz2.