Re: CMake, file extensions

On 13/02/17 10:12, Felix Salfelder wrote:
> On Sun, Feb 12, 2017 at 09:40:35PM -0500, al davis wrote:
>> The file suffix .. .so , .dylib, .dll ....  others?  Aside from just
>> the name match, having different suffix makes for an inconsistent
>> user experience.  The names are different on different systems.
>
> i ran into this, when I added dlopen to qucs. there, i add the platform
> dependent suffix to the plugin name, before dlopen. i.e. in the UI, all
> plugin names are stripped-down.
>
> somehow inspired by modprobe. only takes the module name (without
> suffix) as argument. iirc some day linux changed ".o" to ".ko" for
> modules. and that change was not visible on the user end.
>
> what we could do, is replace ".so$" by the platform specific suffix
> before dlopen (and warn). otherwise, if the name does not end with
> ".so", just add the suffix. that should go to c_attach.cc and md.h.
>
>> Should we make up a new suffix that is the same on all systems?
>
> that would be another way. any plans to maintain backwards compatibility
> with that? side effects? advantages? shared objects are not portable, i
> consider it less confusing to use the platform dependent extension.
> when i think of an nfs share or a usb stick with a gnucap working
> directory (and a jit cache), i do want different extensions...
>
> cheers
> felix
>

You could do something similar to what matlab does. It uses custom 
suffix for compiled shared libraries (mex files) but with a platform 
specific extension (e.g. .mexw64 for win 64, .mexa64 for linux 64 bit 
etc.). Under the hood they are just shared libraries.

The advantage of this approach is that they can be on the Maltab search 
path and easily found without mixing up with other shared libraries and 
different platforms versions can coexist. The qucs gui has already 
implemented a search path for schematic files, like a compiler search 
path, so subcircuit diagrams can exist in any directory in the path list 
and be found just by their name, this could easily be extended to cover 
shared libraries with custom extensions.

Regards,

Richard

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