Ilya Zakharevich on Mon, 6 Nov 2000 15:32:26 -0500


[Date Prev] [Date Next] [Thread Prev] [Thread Next] [Date Index] [Thread Index]

Re: [PARI] about the behavior of install()


On Mon, Nov 06, 2000 at 08:14:35PM +0100, Bill Allombert wrote:
> >   a) makes the directory optional;
> >   b) does not hardwire the DLL prefix and postfix (which are
> >      different on different systems...);

> I do not understand.  On a `normal' system , you can create and use
> shared object with the name you like. The name affects only the
> automatic linking (ld.so) and not the explicit linking (libdl).

Are you discussing *nix or what?  On most systems there is neither
ld.so, nor libdl (and no *.so at all ;-).

Let me make my complaint more explicit: suppose you want to access a
library for same "software package", e.g., FFTquick.  It may be called
libFFTquick.so on *nix systems, and FFTquick.dll for DOSish systems.

The situation is somewhat easier for packages specially designed to
work with PARI, since you have control to name the DLLs contrary to
the system conventions.  However, even in this case there may be
complications.

For example, to ensure compatibility with FAT filesystems, OS/2
*forces* the DLL names to follow 8.3 convention.  So a DLL cannot be
named libFFTquick.so.  Additionally, it may take additional steps to
create DLLs which do not follow the system name-conventions...

Ilya