New InstallShield: no more DLLs

[Christian Lescher]

> > > Also, there is at present an unresolved and
> > > deep-seated bug (possibly not even in GHC) that prevents some very simple
> > > DLLized programs from working.
> >
> > When may Win users expect this bug to be fixed? (A difficult question, I know.)
>
> I've given up on it for the moment; having looked at the source code of ld,
> asked on the binutils and Cygwin mailing lists, and a few other things, I
> can't work out what the problem is. I do have a few more things to try, but
> I don't hold out much hope of fixing it soon without help.

I'd like to offer help, but I'm afraid I don't know enough about the 'interna' of GHC
and cygwin :-( [Would be nice, if I could learn more about it in the future!]
Besides, I've got some (not so fortunate) news: even after updating binutils and the
whole cygwin to the latest version, the problem with *statically* linked and
afterwards stripped DLLs build with GHC remains - the unstripped version works well,
but the stripped one crashes in some constellations. I will try to make this error
reproducable and let you know about it. Something is still wrong here - probably with
cygwin. Maybe this has also got something to do with the dyn. linking problem?

> > Although I regard statically linking as much more important than the DLLized
> > alternative, dynamically linking is (was?) an important feature of GHC for Win -
> > f.e. to safe space when distributing a bunch of EXEs / DLLs build with GHC.
>
> This is only a good idea if you really are distributing several DLLs or EXEs
> built with GHC (so that you do get space savings), and even then you have to
> ask yourself if it's worth the risk of DLL Hell (which I have suffered from
> several times). Disk space is so cheap now that you really have to be hurt
> somewhere (e.g. increased download times, decreased performance because of
> large unshared binaries) before it's worth dynamic linking (except to
> relatively stable system libraries).

Yes, that's true. However, dynamically linking would be a feature.

Cheers, Christian