RE: [avrdude-dev] -static on cygwin

[E. Weddington]

On 24 Feb 2003 at 21:09, Sander Pool wrote:

> 
> Eric,
> 
> I missed the beginning of the thread 

Actually you didn't, that *was* the beginning. :-)

> but why would it be bad to ship
> two additional dlls? If you link statically you wouldn't save any
> space, right? These dlls also don't interfere with normal system
> operation because they are cygwin specific and can live in the bin
> directory.
> 
> What am I missing?
> 

There is nothing bad per se about shipping dlls. This stems from a 
philosophical choice.

Ideally I prefer to have a program that is statically linked because 
I can then move that one executable anywhere and use it; it won't 
have any dependencies. 

As Joerg said there is the potential problem of versions of dlls. In 
practice it really wouldn't be that much of an issue.

Yes space can be saved. If I just need a handful of functions I still 
have to ship the entire dll. The cygwin1.dll is almost 1M in size. 
That's a lot for use of only a handful of functions.

Plus there is potential licensing issues. The cygwin dll 
(cygwin1.dll) is licensed under GPL. If you link to it, your program 
becomes GPL. While this isn't a problem with avrdude, since it 
already is GPL, it can be with other open source projects that have a 
different license. Plus, there is the issue of the offer of the 
cygwin dll source.

I prefer to build with MinGW when I can because there are a lot less 
strings attached and it seems to me there are less shared library 
issues, i.e. it seems to default to statically link.

I've talked to Marc Wetzel and there is a good possibility that in 
the future with some modifications to avrdude it could be built under 
MinGW. It would involve writing native Win32 serial port code which 
shouldn't be too much of an issue. I will probably look into this 
after the March release of WinAVR. For the March release, I will 
stick with the Cygwin build while all the recent changes stabilize.

Eric