On Sun, Jan 18, 2026 at 08:15:58AM +0200, Eli Zaretskii wrote: > > > > > (Strangely, ctexi2any.exe, > > > > > which I presumed will load them, is not installed.) Are the DLLs > > > > > loaded by explicit dlopen calls, which use their full absolute file > > > > > names? > > > > > > > > Something like that, yes. The libtool .la files are used on some > > > > platforms to find the file names to dlopen. > > > > > > Does Perl code use the *.la files? Because AFAIK libtool is not > > > involved in loading the DLL libraries on Windows at run time. > > > > Yes, it is Texinfo::XSLoader code that does that. > > Oh. Then it means the installation is not "relocatable", i.e. the > absolute file names written in the *.la files must be the places where > the libraries are installed. Or is there some environment variable > that can be set to override that? To be "relocatable", file names > should be relative to some common root, so that the entire > installation tree could be moved to a different location, and the > programs will still work. This is especially important on Windows, > where many people don't build packages for their systems, but instead > download prebuilt binaries and install them according to their local > arrangements of the directory tree. Previous Texinfo releases didn't > impose such restrictions, AFAIR.
It hasn't changed since previous Texinfo releases. XS modules are installed and loaded in the same way. I doubt that a Texinfo installation would be "relocatable" on MS-Windows. It would have to find the .la files in the first place. Once it's done that, in theory it should work as we don't rely on absolute file names in the .la file.
