Subject: Re: bug#78410: Patch for tiny improve cl wrapper script

From: Nick Bowler <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 15 May 2025 19:30:29 -0400

On Thu, May 15, 2025 at 02:07:39PM -0600, Karl Berry wrote:
> > I think we'd better also search for lib$lib.dll.a even it's a odd 
> > behavior to search lib$lib.a for cl. 
> 
> What is "cl"? "Command line"? Doesn't make sense to me.

"cl" is Microsoft's C compiler.

> > However I don't know if that's ok because it doesn't seem to be
> > useful.
> 
> If it's not useful then why did you take the time to propose the change?
> Does anyone/anything actually use .dll.a files? Search engines have very
> few, though not zero, results for me. --thanks, karl.

I think libfoo.dll.a would be an import library (a detail of using
shared libraries on Windows) created by a MinGW build environment.

So perhaps this sort of thing will help when a project is being built
with Microsoft tools but depends on a shared library built with MinGW?
But I'm certainly no expert in this area so it would be good to know
what's actually being solved.

Cheers,
  Nick