Re: Fwd: Gaim bug #1079733

> 
> Problem:
> Gaim installer fails to recognize Cygwin on the PATH.  Gaim fails to
> recognize Cygwin on the PATH.  Consequently, Gaim produces no GUI when
> run.  There is no evident relationship between installing Eclipse,
> Eclipse's CDT, and the consequent Cygwin and Gaim's sudden loss of GUI.
> 

It seems like we've been through this before.

I'd like to point out that this issue only manifests itself when you
have cygwin's tcl installed.  The real problem is that cygwin's tcl
dll is misnamed to be identical to the native tcl dll (tcl84.dll). 
I've tried to get in touch with the cygwin people about getting it
renamed to "cygtcl84.dll" or something like that (which is consistent
with how the rest of the cygwin dlls are (re)named); my efforts didn't
get much traction. You can search for a thread with the subject
"wincvs and cygwin" in the cygwin mailing list:
http://cygwin.com/ml/cygwin/ (in the Jan - Feb 2004 range).

> Troubling behaviour:
> Gaim process loads and generates three threads.  Network traffic is
> generated.  No diagnostic is generated.  No window handle is associated
> with the Gaim process.
> 

I agree that this is bad.  Note that it is is bombing out in the win32
API LoadLibrary call, not in gaim code.

> Expected behaviour:
> Either the UI appears, or some diagnostic, *clearly* indicating the
> difficulty and the resolution appears.
> 
> Resolution:
> (minimal)
>    Gaim installer recognizes Cygwin on the PATH and renames or removes
> Gaim's tcl.dll.

This isn't necessarily as bad as the option below, it seems like a
worse idea to add an ugly hack to the gaim program than to the
installer.

> (better)
>    Gaim recognizes Cygwin on the PATH and either carefully explicitly
> indicates which DLLs are loaded, or renames Gaim's tcl.dll.
> --
>    -- Eric Towers ! fuzzyeric@xxxxxxxxxxx
> 
> ----- End forwarded message -----

I also want to mention that Gaim isn't the only application that has
this issue - WinCVS is one other application that I know has the same
issue.  Any other program that tries to load the tcl dll and
encounters the cygwin dll when expecting the native one will have the
same problem.

It is a bad idea to put cygwin in your PATH; it can cause an number of
unpredictable problems if dll names conflict.  That said, I don't
think that gaim should have to work around a bug in the cygwin tcl dll
naming.

-D


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