Re: [Monotone-devel] need error message for missing dlls on Windows

[Matthew Gregan]

At 2007-05-20T10:42:00-0400, Stephen Leake wrote:
> When I run a mtn on Windows, it fails with no message if the required dlls
> are not in PATH.

The DLLs do not need to be in the PATH.  Windows will look for them in the
same directory as the monotone executable.

> It is not hard to arrange for them to be in PATH; my problem is how to
> get a good error message from mtn, rather than the current silence.
> 
> I compile mtn with MinGW, but I typically don't have MinGW in PATH
> when running, which is why I noticed this problem.

Use the Windows installer from monotone.ca or install your built version in
a similar way (with the required DLLs in the same directory as mtn.exe) and
it should be fine.

> I assume the linker has added some dll loading code before the call to
> 'main'.

Not exactly.  The runtime linker does this work before any code in the
monotone executable gets a chance to run.

We can look at linking the libraries statically, but I'm not sure it's worth
the effort--we already distribute monotone in such a way that it'll Just
Work.  It's only because you're building from source and not setting the
runtime environment up appropriately that you're running into this problem.

Using LoadLibrary/GetProcAddress to load the libraries at runtime is not an
option, it'd be a whole lot of extra maintenance burden for very close to no
benefit.

Cheers,
-mjg
-- 
Matthew Gregan                     |/
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