Re: [bug-gnu-libiconv] patch - build for mingw host

[Bruno Haible]

Hello,

Roumen Petrov wrote:
> First change is to use libtool flag -avoid-version. With this flag 
> libtool will create shared library with name "libiconv.dll". If the flag 
> is omitted the name is in format "libiconv[-VERSUFFIX].dll", where 
> VERSUFFIX is computed from version info. Since version-info is not 
> specified result is zero, i.e. libiconv-0.dll. Same for libcharset.

This is strange. Last time I installed libiconv for mingw, it created three
files

  lib/libiconv.la
  lib/libiconv.dll.a
  bin/libiconv-2.dll

and programs ran fine. Why would you want to omit the version number in the
DLL by default? It makes it impossible for the dynamic linker to distinguish a
DLL which has the necessary API from an older DLL.

Some mingw distributors may want to omit the "-VERSUFFIX", by putting
"-avoid-version" in their LDFLAGS variable when building libiconv. But
this is something that is best left to the responsibility of the distributor.

> Next change in ./configure.ac is to set docdir and htmldir. This is for 
> autoconf before 2.60. Note the current requirement is for autoconf 
> version 2.52.

Thanks for mentioning it; I've noticed it meanwhile too. The next version
of libiconv/configure.ac will have AC_PREREQ([2.60]).

Bruno