Re: Compiling for Windows [Was: argv revisited]

[Florian Pelz <pelzflorian pelzflorian de>]

On 05/06/2016 07:01 PM, Lucas Levrel wrote:
> Le 5 mai 2016, Andrew Robinson a écrit :
> > 1) Because there are between 40 to 120Mb worth of libraries or their
> > dependencies I would have to post on my website.
>
> It's not clear to me whether one has to distribute GTK if it's linked
> statically, because one doesn't distribute the libs themselves. But I'm
> no lawyer and didn't investigate the question (I don't distribute
> publicly my small app).

I'm not a lawyer, but:

Part of the idea of the LGPL is, as I understand it, that the user can
relink with a modified version of the library. Imagine party A gives an
LGPL library only to party B who then distributes an app linking with
the library to C. If B refuses C's request for the library's source
code, C has no way to link to a modified version of the library.
Therefore I believe you have to distribute the source code of the
library version you used at least upon request.

In particular, when linking statically, you also have to provide
linkable object files or source code for _your_ application.

I.e. you have to be able to provide source code for all LGPL portions no
matter if you use MSYS2, MXE, Fedora packages or compile the
dependencies yourself. There's no way around it.