* Keith MARSHALL wrote on Thu, Dec 22, 2005 at 06:17:57PM CET: > Ralf Wildenhues wrote, quoting Bob Frieshahn: > > > > OK, so the only remaining case really is MSYS/MinGW itself. Do we > > know of win32 installations that provide a `file' command that does > > not do what we expect? > > While it is true that MSYS/MinGW doesn't include a `file' command as > standard, it is perfectly feasible to use a `foreign' implementation > with MSYS; e.g. I have installed the GnuWin32 v4.16 implementation > http://sourceforge.net/project/showfiles.php?group_id=23617&package_id=18878 > into my `/usr/local' MSYS tree. Not sure how robust it is; e.g. it > misidentifies manpage sources as `MKS Spell hash (old format)', and > its own manpage refers to incorrect locations for the `magic' files, > but it does seem to identify executables, shell scripts, and `*.a' > or `*.dll' libraries reasonably well.
Those are the important bits. Thanks for mentioning this, I'll try GnuWin32 for testing. > Not suggesting that you should always expect `file' to be present, but > some MSYS users may have it. Maybe, if it's needed to improve libtool > support, we could consider adding it to a future msysDTK release, or > provide it as a mingwPORT. Well, I've thought of rewriting func_win32_libid in a way that would not require `file' at all, rather than asking you to add it. Have to think about this a bit more, when I have more time. * Earnie Boyd wrote on Thu, Dec 22, 2005 at 10:45:37PM CET: > > Some fine user donated a shell script version of file and attached it > to a bug report about this issue. I was planning to put it in a next > release. It has been ages since a release has happened and at the > moment it looks like it will be ages still. While you're already considering adding tools to improve libtool support, may I kindly point to http://sourceforge.net/mailarchive/message.php?msg_id=13069136 which has not been addressed yet, as far as I can see. It would help us very much to convince to change the GCS, and it would enable a complexity reduction (and thus quite some speedup, esp. on mingw in some cases) for 'libtool --mode=link' with a large number of objects. Cheers, Ralf
