[gmx-users] Shared library version binary on CYGWIN

[Makoto Yoneya]

Dear Mark and GROMACS users:

Mark wrote.
> You can't build DLLs since the cygwin build tools are unix-style, and 
> the GROMACS build strategy is unix-specific. --enable-shared also 
> probably won't work for unix-style shared libraries, because the dynamic 
> linker is probably the Windows ld.exe, which can't deal with unix-style 
> shared libraries.

Thanks a lot for the comment.

> It would be possible to make GROMACS write proper DLLs using the cygwin 
> dlltool functionality, but nobody has ever cared enough to do it. I'd 
> struggle to imagine a useful Windows environment where providing 100MB 
> of statically-linked executables was a serious problem. 

I found the libtool within gromacs source (both 3.3.3 and 4.0.4) is not as
new as that of e.g. fftw-3.2.1 (which use the libtool-2.2.6).
I'm wondering if the libtool version was updated to the newer one,
then the DLLs could be generated properly, because fftw-3.2.1 can
build DLL on cygwin if it configured with --enable-shared.
I'd tried that with gromacs a little but no success as I have no detailed
knowledge on GNU autotools.

> For a course, 
> you won't even need the whole executable set. mdrun, grompp, editconf, 
> pdb2gmx, genion, g_energy, trjconv and maybe one or two more analysis 
> tools to suit the course should do it.

You're right.
That may be a practical solution in the current situation.

Kind Regards.

Makoto Yoneya, Dr.
AIST, Japan