Building XFCE on Cygwin

[Maarten Boekhold]

Hi all,

I've been mucking around trying to come up with an easy way to get the 
various plugins of XFCE to compile/link properly under Cygwin, but 
haven't found the best solution yet.

I do have a way, but it involves adding various 
'__atribute__((__dllexport__))' and '__attribute__((__dllimport__))' 
statements at various places in the source code, and I'd like to try to 
avoid that.

The most promising approach is described in the below mail, which I sent 
to the cygwin list, but have not received any reply to yet. I figured 
I'd forward it here, on the off-chance that it rings a bell for somebody.

-------- Original Message --------
Subject: Re: Building DLL
Date: Mon, 12 Jul 2004 19:52:49 +0400
From: Maarten Boekhold <boekhold at emirates.net.ae>
To: cygwin at cygwin.com
References: <18b27f187b2a.187b2a18b27f at emirates.net.ae>

Hi all,

Sorry to keep going on about this, I really want to get this working.

I've made *some* progress in how to build "plugin libraries". I have
attached my test case to this mail in case somebody is willing to have a
look at it. Let me describe it first.

I did some reading on the libtool documentation, and according to that,
libtool 1.5.6 has specific support for dlopen'ed libraries (which is
what glib/gmodule uses under the hood if I'm not mistaken). The trick is
an extra macro to your configure.ac (AC_LIBTOOL_DLOPEN) and two
additional flags to libtool: -module and -export-dynamic. Now, I'm not
sure if that support is supposed to work on cygwin. But together with a
"plugin.def" file that defines to the library that a symbol is exported
by the executable, I can now get things to compile.

Caveat: I cannot get the 'plugin.def' file passed to the gcc command
line when linking:

/bin/bash ./libtool --mode=link gcc  -g -O2   -o libplugin.la -rpath
/usr/local/lib -no-undefined -module plugin.def libplugin_la-plugin.lo
-lgobject-2.0 -lglib-2.0 -lintl -liconv
gcc -shared  .libs/libplugin_la-plugin.o  -L/usr/lib
/usr/lib/libgobject-2.0.dll.a /usr/lib/libglib-2.0.dll.a
/usr/lib/libintl.dll.a /usr/lib/libiconv.dll.a  -o .libs/cygplugin-0.dll
-Wl,--image-base=0x10000000 -Wl,--out-implib,.libs/libplugin.dll.a

So instead I editted the generated 'libtool' (after running autogen.sh)
and added it manually:

# Commands used to build and install a shared archive.
archive_cmds="\$CC -shared \$libobjs \$deplibs \$compiler_flags -o
\$output_objdir/\$soname \${wl}--image-base=0x10000000
\${wl}--out-implib,\$lib plugin.def"

Note the "plugin.def" at the end. Now 'make' succeeds. If anybody knows
how I can pass the "plugin.def" to the GCC command line, I'd be very
interested to know.

Run 'make install', and then:
	/usr/local/bin/plugintest /usr/local/lib/libplugin.la

This now gives:

$ /usr/local/bin/plugintest.exe /usr/local/lib/libplugin.la

** ERROR **:  1627507512s not a valid Win32 application.
aborting...
Aborted (core dumped)

Is this expected, and is there a way to fix this? Has anybody seen this
before? (note: for people not familiar with gmodule, the g_module_open()
function explicitly tests whether this is a libtool library, and if so
retrieves the actual DLL name from the libplugin.la file).

Kind regards,

Maarten

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