Proposal: Publish nethost static library

[nxtn]

See discussion in #7114

Using "s" suffix as a temporary workaround to distinguish between static/import libraries.

[dagood]

The packaging infra work looks good, nice. I'm not familiar with the consequences of shipping this, e.g. signing, delivering both the dynamic nethost.lib and static nethosts.lib on Windows (at least that's what this appears to be?), and the best way to resolve naming issues to get rid of the temp s suffix.

@vitek-karas @elinor-fung

[vitek-karas]

I looked at what we do for other libraries. For example CRT prepends lib to for the static ones: https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/cpp/c-runtime-library/crt-library-features?view=vs-2019

So in that case it would be nethost.lib for the dynamic one and libnethost.lib for the static one on Windows. For Linux/Max I think it would be good to be consistent, so libnethost.a there as well - but I don't know how other products handle this - @lpereira may know.

In any case it's an explicit action to use this in a build, so people can pick one easily and there should be no naming issues I'm aware of.

As for the signing: I don't know what our policies are shipping unsigned code, but since it is not an executable itself, I think it should be fine. @GrabYourPitchforks would know for sure I think.

/cc @jeffschwMSFT @swaroop-sridhar

[nxtn]

The lib prefix looks good to me.

[lpereira]

On Unix, libraries are usually always prefixed with "lib" and postfixed with something like ".so" (ELF systems) or ".dylib" (Mach-O systems) or ".a" (in case of static libraries). Which one gets picked depends on how the compiler driver is instructed to call the linker (with e.g. the -static parameter in GCC and Clang).

In other words, I find it kind of confusing to have the static library having the prefix and the shared library without it: to link with the static library, you'd pass -lnethost (with potentially a -L somewhere), but to link with the shared library, you'd need to pass the path to the shared library instead.

[vitek-karas]

@lpereira On Linux/Mac the shared library does have the prefix - it should be (already) called:

• libnethost.so
• libnethost.dylib

Now we would be basically adding libnethost.a as well.