Re: strange ezwinports issue

[Eli Zaretskii <eliz@gnu.org>]

> From: Sivaram Neelakantan <nsivaram.net@gmail.com>
> Date: Tue, 08 Sep 2015 08:32:18 +0530
> 
> On Mon, Sep 07 2015,Eli Zaretskii wrote:
> 
> > Does the problem go away if you put all of the ezwinports DLLs in the
> > same directory where you have emacs.exe?
> 
> Yes, it does.  Thanks for the fix.  What changed that necessitates
> this kind of fix?

There was no change that necessitated this.  What this experiment
means is that you have a small "DLL hell" on your hands: you have an
incompatible copy of some DLL that is used by some of the ezwinports
that lives in some other directory which is closer to the beginning of
your PATH than the ezwinports' bin/ directory.  So when Emacs loads,
say, libgnutls-28.dll, and looks for its dependency DLLs, it finds
that incompatible DLL first, tries to load it, which fails (due to
whatever makes it incompatible), and then the load of libgnutls-28.dll
fails because of that.

When a Windows program needs to load a DLL, it always looks first in
the directory where that program's .exe file lives, so copying the
DLLs there "solved" that problem for you.

I suggest to invoke the dependency walker
(http://www.dependencywalker.com/) on every DLL in the new
ezwinports's bin/ directory, and look for the dependency DLLs that
live outside that bin/ directory -- you will surely find your offender
soon enough.

Or you can keep the ezwinports DLLs in the same directory with
emacs.exe, if you don't need to use those DLLs from other packages.