Cygwin + DLL

[Karim BELABAS <Karim.Belabas@math.u-psud.fr>]

Hi developers,

  I have downloaded a recent Cygwin version to try and build that ellusive
libpari.dll, which has been periodically requested, and which I had been
unable to build so far [ actually, I could get the DLL to build, but gp-dyn
crashed ].

Lo and behold, I removed the old cygwin hacks and it worked (almost) out of
the box ! [ you still need to upgrade from CVS, there were a few glitches ]

Also, install() works in gp-dyn, and the bench is about as fast as under
Linux (DLL takes longer to load though).

Problems:

1) install() does not work with gp-sta. install itself seems to behave
correctly, but the DLL is apparently not properly loaded and gp-sta segfaults
when calling the installed function [ later, it actually crashed XP... ].
Since gp-dyn is (much smaller and) a little faster than gp-sta, it is not a
major problem. I changed Configure to build gp-dyn.exe by default.

2) I do not have the slightest idea how to extend Win* executable search path
[ I did not really bother to try and find out ]. So it works under Cygwin,
but not by double-clicking on the gp icon, unless one manually moves all
involved DLLs (cygwin1, readline, ncurses, libpari) to the directory gp is
installed in.

3) It would make sense to bundle everything (all dlls, gp-dyn.exe, docs, perl
for online help) into a self-extracting, auto-installing gp.exe file. It's
more than a little stupid to download and install a 50MB archive when you
could get the full PARI source code on a 1.4MB floppy, but ... Anyway, I
downloaded NullSoft installer, but Windoze crashed before I could check it
out. Since I had enough today, I let it reboot under Linux. More about this
next time I boot Windoze.

Cheers,

    Karim.

P.S: I have removed all the complicated cygwin hacks (Makefile.DLLs, etc) that
never really worked.
-- 
Karim Belabas                     Tel: (+33) (0)1 69 15 57 48
Dép. de Mathématiques, Bât. 425   Fax: (+33) (0)1 69 15 60 19
Université Paris-Sud              http://www.math.u-psud.fr/~belabas/
F-91405 Orsay (France)            http://www.parigp-home.de/  [PARI/GP]