Need Feedback: Technical Questions Regarding GCC/GCJ 3.3 Build under MSYS/MingW

Thu Mar 13 06:15:00 GMT 2003

Hi Tom,
>You can use multiple invocations of ar instead. That's what libtool
>already does. (I think I must have missed part of this discussion,
>since I thought someone already mentioned that.)

When you need to use multiple invocations of ar, you take the hit
of having to sort the full object file list and check for duplicate
entries. This takes a while and is an overhead that could be spared
if a tool like ar.exe (on MingW) had file lists integrated into it.
>I think all cygwin tools automatically supported `@' file lists. The
>last time I used cygwin, this was built into the library. (I know
>nothing about mingw and how it is similar to or different from
>cygwin.)

Something like this is possible if the runtime and the executables
are in cahoots with each other, as with Cygwin, but not for native
Windows executables. (I admit I don't know how Cygwin's mechanism
works.)
Do you think that command line limitations are the problem of the
platform and not the tools, and that the platform should somehow cope with
this shortcoming? Or do you think that command-line limitations are an
artificial limitation that:
- configure scripts needlessly have to test for and somehow work around
on a case-by-case basis?
- could be overcome if tools like ar, gcc, gcj supported file lists
natively?
-- Mohan
http://www.thisiscool.com/
http://www.animalsong.org/