insight/249: cygwin TCL dll conflict

insight/249: cygwin TCL dll conflict

[daniel_atallah]

>Number:         249
>Category:       insight
>Synopsis:       cygwin TCL dll conflict
>Confidential:   no
>Severity:       non-critical
>Priority:       medium
>Responsible:    unassigned
>State:          open
>Class:          sw-bug
>Submitter-Id:   net
>Arrival-Date:   Thu Feb 05 02:53:00 UTC 2004
>Closed-Date:
>Last-Modified:
>Originator:     daniel_atallah@yahoo.com
>Release:        unknown-1.0
>Organization:
>Environment:
cygwin / win32
>Description:
The tcl dll in cygwin is named the same as the native win32 tcl dll (tcl84.dll currently).  This causes programs that probe for tcl to find the cygwin dll instead of the native dll (or no dll at all) if cygwin's bin directory is in the path.  Of course, this causes problems for native win32 programs which cannot load the cygwin dll and subsequently terminate.

This has been happening with the windows port of Gaim (http://gaim.sf.net/win32/) and WinCVS (http://cvsgui.sourceforge.net/).

The argument can obviously be made that the cygwin bin directory should not be in the path, but from the quantity of bugreports coming into the gaim project, it seems to be a common thing to do for users.  

I've been tasked with resolving the problem in gaim, hence my interest in getting this resolved.
>How-To-Repeat:
Install gaim 0.75 on a Windows system with cygwin 1.5.7-1 installed including the tcltk package.

Place cygwin's bin dir in your path.  Start gaim and watch it exit. 
>Fix:
Rename the cygwin tcl dlls to something more consistent with the naming of other cygwin dlls (e.g. cygtcl84.dll, etc)
>Release-Note:
>Audit-Trail:
>Unformatted: