Re: Texinfo 7.2.90 build with mingw.org's MinGW: configury

On Wed, Jan 14, 2026 at 06:44:08PM +0200, Eli Zaretskii wrote:
>   $ /d/usr/Perl/bin/perl -V:perllibs
>   perllibs='-lmoldname -lkernel32 -luser32 -lgdi32 -lwinspool -lcomdlg32 -ladvapi32 -lshell32 -lole32 -loleaut32 -lnetapi32 -luuid -lws2_32 -lmpr -lwinmm -lversion -lodbc32 -lodbccp32 -lcomctl32';
> 
> All of the libraries it mentions are Windows system libraries.  The
> only exception is -luuid, which is missing.  To overcome that problem,
> I simply built and installed libuuid, which gave me an import library
> and a DLL.  This solved the problem of libtool refusing to build XS as
> shared libraries.  None of the built DLLs actually need libuuid, so
> its only role here is to pacify the linker, which sees the -luuid
> switch and therefore must find a corresponding import library in order
> to be able to produce a DLL.

In the mean time, I removed perllibs from the link command...  I do not
have a good feeling on what should be best.  In theory it should be
better with it, but in practice, it has never been needed and has
occasionally posed problem.

> The other problem was to avoid putting junk into tta/C/Makefile
> because of the error message "perl -MExtUtils::Embed -e ldopts" emits.
> I suggest to solve this by redirecting its stderr to the null device,
> like this:
> 
>   PERL_EXTUTILS_EMBED_ccopts=
>   PERL_EXTUTILS_EMBED_ldopts=
>   if test "z$extutils_embed" = 'zyes' ; then
>     PERL_EXTUTILS_EMBED_ccopts=`${PERL} -MExtUtils::Embed -e ccopts 2> /dev/null`
>     PERL_EXTUTILS_EMBED_ldopts=`${PERL} -MExtUtils::Embed -e ldopts 2> /dev/null`
>   fi
> 
> In addition, I think we should run the output through a Sed script
> that replaces backslashes with forward slashes.  That's because the
> output is
> 
>    -s -static-libgcc -static-libstdc++ -L"D:\usr\Perl\lib\CORE" -L"C:\MinGW\i686-w64-mingw32\lib"  D:\usr\Perl\lib\CORE\libperl520.a
> 
> and the backslashes then cause Bash to produce nonsensical file names
> like D:usrPerllibCORElibperl520.a, which then fails generation of XS
> shared libraries down the line (libtool doesn't find the file, and
> assumes it's a static archive, not an import library).  Something like
> this:
> 
>   PERL_EXTUTILS_EMBED_ldopts=`${PERL} -MExtUtils::Embed -e ldopts 2> /dev/null | sed -e 's,\\,/,g'`
> 
> and similarly with ccopts.  I think this can be done on all platforms,
> since only on Windows Perl might report file names with backslashes.

In the mean time I also removed the use of ExtUtils::Embed, and replaced
by an explicit selection of options, but I think that it is a good thing
to be able to at least see the ExtUtils::Embed output, so I left the
code in comment, I'll apply what you propose.

-- 
Pat