Hi friends,

Probably long post and thread...

Since the introduction of Patrick Monnerat's patch on 11-Aug-2007,
focused on replacing the dynamic loading of LDAP libraries using
dlopen(), with the new approach that 'simply' links libcurl with this
libraries in the same way as it is done for other third party libs,
there have aroused several issues.

Guenter Knauf has worked and is still working in getting LDAP support
fully functional.

But before going any further I think we should try to get some facts
straight, and probably make more clear other ones. Of course I don't
have all the answers, I have questions and some opinions

Just to make things more clear.

When I mention Cygwin I mean Cygwin in its POSIX emulation
capabilities/compiler/linker and that implies that cygwin.dll will be
needed to run the program.

When I mention MinGW it is the compiler/linker capable of producing
native Windows programs that do not rely on cygwin.dll

Of course libcurl can be crosscompiled from Cygwin to a MinGW target,
and in this case we should be addressing a Windows native build, with
the exception that we will be able to run the autoconf tool chain in a
POSIX environment

POINT ONE)

First of all, I propose to get rid of winldap from _any_ build that
isn't a Windows target native build. In other words don't use winldap
for Cygwin builds.

Some reasons:

Cygwin is not really windows.

In order to be able to compile libcurl with winldap on Cygwin, Windows
headers need to be included and WIN32 symbol undefined afterwards.
Ugly, ugly hack which for sure will bite us and our users sooner or
later.

We are forcing winldap down the throat of any Cygwin program built with libcurl.

There are other POSIX LDAP libraries which can be used, even with more
friendly licenses and less bugs.

POINT TWO)

I propose that Windows native builds of libcurl should be allowed to
use the LDAP lib of choice, not just winldap.

POINT THREE)

Mostly questions related with platforms that have autoconf tool chain
or at least that are capable of running a configure script.

Would it be possible to pass to configure in option --with-ldap just
the path of the LDAP librariy to use and let configure find out the
complete name of the libs to use in a similar way as the check for
libssh2 is done right now ?

Besides the suffixes for the LDAP libraries, which other names do ldap
libraries have besides 'lber' and 'ldap' ?

POINT FOUR)

MSVC compilers, versions and SDKs supported, deserve a future
thread but I think we should solve point one and three before
dispersing too much.

-- 
-=[Yang]=-