dll libraries marked for random execution?

[Linda Walsh <cygwin at tlinx dot org>]

Pardon me, but I have some questions about libraries under
cygwin if anyone knows... If there's a doc somewhere that
answers these questions, a pointer to it would be appreciated.

Are all dll libraries supposed to be invocable as executables?
What about libraries with ".a" extensions?  I looked on my SuSE
linux system and none of the ".a" files are marked executable
though most of the ".so" files are marked executable.

If something is not supposed to be an executable, wouldn't it be
better administrative practice (if not better security practice)
to mark it as non-executable?

Isn't ".so" used for sharable libraries and ".a" is used to bind
the routines into the resultant binary?

I was under the impression that usually ".dll" files were shared
under NT, but all the libraries in "/usr/lib" and "/lib" are marked
".a".  Many seem to come in pairs: <libname>.dll.a and <libname>.a
but if they end with ".a" does that imply they are linked into the
final binary (not shared)?

I'm under the impression that certain files with names of the form
cyg<lib>.dll, in /windows/system32, are sharable.  But it seems like
most (all?) of the "standard" (non cygwin specific) libraries have
the ".a" extension.

If non-cygwin support libraries are all unsharable with ".a"
extensions does that imply there "could" be ".so" files to enable
the libraries being shared?

I'd like to get rid of the "executable" bit being set on files that
are not really executable.  Besides being bad practice, it also
creates problems when looking for completion values in the shell.  Seem
to remember some other issues related to dll's being marked as
executable, but don't recall what they were off-hand...

Tnx,
Linda


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