On 5/13/07, Thomas Christian Chust <address@hidden> wrote:
I would only change the behaviour of the build if it doesn't mean a lot
of work. If the library names were changed, though, I would try to keep
them identical across all platforms to reduce confusion of the users ;-)
Windows libraries are already gratuitously different, because in Windows-land, .lib is used as the suffix for both a dynamic stub library and a static library. So, a -s postifx is used to distinguish the static libraries. Other parts of the postfix are used to distinguish debug vs. release,
i.e. libchicken-ds.lib. More postfixes will be added if we ever decide to compile single vs. multithreaded libraries and etc.
Currently, Unix-y builds don't do any more than compile a static and a dynamic library. There's no debug version, there's no multithreaded version, etc. Since Unix-y / GCC suffixes are sane with respect to static vs. dynamic libraries, there's currently no reason to add postfixes to distinguish more cases.
Current GCC / Cygwin / MinGW implement suffixes correctly with respect to static vs. dynamic libraries. This is the most convenient for the user. I see no reason to mess that up in the name of gratuitous uniformity. Mac OS X is just weird, so it's a case of whether it's worth doing something specific for their benefit, to make their lives easier when linking.
Hey I just had a brilliant idea. We don't have to rename anything. We could just symlink libchicken-s.a to libchicken.a. Then the user can have his cake and eat it too.
Cheers,
Brandon Van Every