On 4 Mar 2011, at 03:59, Peter O'Gorman wrote: >>> Mac OS X does not care about file name extensions; .dylib is just a >>> convention for native dynamic libraries. > > The static linker when it sees a -l flag will look for files beginning with > "lib" and ending in ".dylib", ".so" (though this is recent and perhaps not > documented) and ".a". So, I think you could say that it cares about file name > extensions.
One is free to implement programs that do such things. >>> So the wanted behavior is to first try opening a library without adding an >>> extension, and then try out different endings. On Mac OS X, it would be >>> best trying out .dylib first - I haven't seen any other ending in use. > > It does seem as though guile should sometimes be trying lt_dlopen() first - > then libltdl will attempt to open whatever it's given. That might be an hack. >> -- the libtool archive extension .la >> -- the extension used for native dynamically loadable modules on the >> host platform, e.g., .so, .sl, etc. > > On Mac OS X, libtool's idea of the native dynamically loadable module > extension is ".so", and it's not going to change. > > However, I can see the point that libltdl should try .dylib as well as .so > for lt_dlopenext on Mac OS X. I will come up with a patch for that. The important thing is to try .dylib - all libraries I have sen use it. It can of course try .so as well. Hans