Hi,

It took me some seven days to compile and successfully link DBI::Sybase1.08 against Sybase OCS15 on Mingw / Windows Vista. I would surely share my trick, it is really difficult to link sybase libraries using Mingw. If I link on VC8, it is linked to msvcr80.dll. It fails to load because of windows side by side dll installation.

So I tried to link using free Mingw, it links with msvcrt.dll. Downloaded mingw, binutils, unix utils (unixutils.sourceforge.net) and nmake from VC8\bin.

I followed the articles at:
http://mingw.org/mingwfaq.shtml#faq-msvcdll
http://sapdb.2scale.net/maxdb-wiki/MS_C++_Toolkit
http://www.geocities.com/yongweiwu/stdcall.htm

And created my own libraries out of %sybase%\dll\*

Step1: Create the following sed file, call it exp.sed

/ \t*ordinal hint/,/^ \t*Summary/{
/^ \t\+0-9\+/{
s/^ \t\+0-9\+ \t\+0-9A-Fa-f\+ \t\+0-9A-Fa-f\+ \t\+\(.*\)/\1/p
}
}


Step2: Create following batch file, call it genlib.bat
echo LIBRARY %1.dll > %1.def
echo EXPORTS >> %1.def
link -dump -exports %1.dll | sed -nf c:\temp\DBD-Sybase-1.08\exports.sed >> %1.def
dlltool -U -d %1.def -l %1.a


Step3: go to %sybase%\dll and run the following loop (type it on dos prompt and press enter)

for /f %i in ('dir /b *.dll') do a %~ni & move /Y %~ni.a ..\lib\ & del %~ni.def
Step4:
Go to DBD-Sybase-1.08 directory, edit makefile.pl, change libct to libsybct.a etc .. and run nmake it compiles and links correctly, but all the tests fail!!!

--------------------------------------------------------
ERROR:
# Tried to use 'DBD::Sybase'.
# Error: Can't load 'C:\temp\DBD-Sybase-1.08\blib\arch/auto/DBD/Sybase/Sybase.dll' for module DBD::Sybase: load_file:The specified procedure could not be found at C:/Perl/lib/DynaLoader.pm line 201.
--------------------------------------------------------

So I tried again to debug:
Went to "DBD-Sybase-1.08\blib\arch\auto\DBD\Sybase"
and issued "link -dump -exports Sybase.dll"

The following dump clearly shows there aren't any methods exported. It seems the __declspec(export) is not evaluated by some preprocessor macro during compilation.

Dump of file Sybase.dll

File Type: DLL

  Section contains the following exports for dll.exp.dll

    00000000 characteristics
    47FAA9E4 time date stamp Tue Apr 08 00:10:28 2008
        0.00 version
           1 ordinal base
           2 number of functions
           2 number of names

    ordinal hint RVA      name

          2    0 00006130 _boot_DBD__Sybase
          1    1 00006130 boot_DBD__Sybase

  Summary

        1000 .bss
        1000 .data
        1000 .edata
        2000 .idata
        5000 .rdata
        1000 .reloc
       16000 .text
[download]

Michael could you please help me, here?


Thanks,
Sanjit