Then I'm wondering why libtool does actually support the cc_basename="cl" with host_os=cygwin at all.

Anyway, my final goal is beyond the MSVC toolchain: I'm about to rework the old patches (http://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/libtool-patches/2008-02/msg00014.html) adding support for the MSVC wrapper called "Parity" (at https://github.com/haubi/parity/ for now), which does:

• not require specific environment variables for MSVC, but can find MSVC from the Registry
• convert Unix to Windows path names as necessary
• provide GCC like commandline options
• provide gcc3-style dependency tracking
• set up the final binary's std-stream mode to O_BINARY
• provide some additional system headers (stdint.h, dlfcn.h, ...)
• emulate some runtime loader features, on Linux known as embedded runpath, embedded soname, LD_BIND_NOW, LD_LIBRARY_PATH, LD_PRELOAD
• probably more

We do use it on Cygwin (now, since Interix is gone) within Gentoo Prefix, to maintain an ecosystem using the native MSVC toolchain, configured in the "lying" way with --build=i586-pc-winnt --host=i586-pc-winnt - which is similar to "multilib" actually.

That is, I'm about to prepare libtool patches to support the --winnt host triplet, which feels a lot more correct for MSVC than using --host=mingw32 - and should support unwrapped cl.exe as well.

But as the application's O_BINARY setting may vary for host_os=winnt then, I prefer to 'diff --strip-trailing-cr' rather than testing for another host_os - or even current binary setting.

Thus the idea is to have the testsuite setup not depend on $host_os, but just ignore CR if possible - as the test programs all have textual output only.

Thanks!
/haubi/

On Cygwin, when using CC=cl.exe (MSVC) as the compiler, some test cases fail just because of unexpected carriage return output from test binaries.

Fortunately, with GNU diff there is the --strip-trailing-cr flag, which allows to easily get the libtool test suite agnostic to CR, independent of any host triplet used:

If 'diff --help' tells about the --strip-trailing-cr flag, attached patch does wrap the host diff command to add that flag for when run as 'diff -u' via $at_diff in the test suite, in addition to stop adding CR to expected output files for mingw.

This allows to succeed following test cases when run on Cygwin with MSVC environment and these configure options: CC=cl CXX="cl /TP" GCJ=no GOC=no F77=no FC=no NM=no CFLAGS= CXXFLAGS=

  27: link against a preloaded static library
  30: deplibs_check_method
  40: build and link against a static library
  41: build and link against a dynamic library
  42: build both static and dynamic
  43: allow_undefined_flag
  49: static library interdependencies
 112: dlloader API

Thanks!
/haubi/