Re: [Mingw-cross-env-list] Question about gcc behaviour

[Mark Brand]

On 04/25/2010 04:37 PM, Kārlis Repsons wrote:
> This is somewhat offtopic, but isn't long, I want to confirm: when given
> -lQtCore, g++ can either include it into the target application or it can link
> target application to it depending on if it's libQtCore.a or libQtCore.so and
> lib format is the only factor, which makes the difference?

I'm not sure if your question is specifically about building for MinGW.  
For MinGW, a file with the ".a" suffix could be a static library or the 
stub of a dynamically loaded (shared) library (DLL). Because Windows 
uses ".dll", the ".so" suffix is not used for MinGW.

For MinGW, "-lQtCore" will link to "libQtCore.a". For unix, the same 
flag links to "libQtCore.so" (dynamic)  or "libQtCore.a" (static) 
depending on which is available and the "-static" flag.

It also useful to know that the Qt libraries have different names 
depending on whether they are static or shared.  The static libraries 
follow the pattern of "libQtCore.a". The shared libraries follow the 
pattern of "libQtCore4.a", and require flags like "-lQtCore4". If you 
use qmake, the right "-l" flags will be in your generated makefiles.

regards,

Mark