Guidance re. MinGW and readline

Mark Mitchell
2005-07-18T00:17:13Z

Chet Ramey, the readline maintainer, has reviwed my patch for GDB here:

http://sources.redhat.com/ml/gdb-patches/2005-06/msg00067.html

Chet has accepted the patch in principle, though he's decided to take a
slightly different approach from the one that I did, modifying rltty.c
to use conditional compilation to determine whether or not to use any of
the various UNIX-ish terminal variants, rather than adding an entirely
separate rlwin32tty.c file. Chet's version (re-write?) of the patch
will be in readline-5.1.

Chet has also decided that the (extremely minimal) Windows termcap
functions that I provided (like "tputs" and "tgoto") should be included
somewhere in the application, rather than in readline itself.

So, I think that there are two paths forward:

(1) Wait for readline-5.1 to be released, incorporate it into src/, and
then to add the minimal termcap stuff to a file in gdb/ that is only
used on MinGW.

(2) I backport Chet's changes to rltty.c to the src/readline/
sourcebase, and then proceed as above. Because we know that these
changes will be in readline-5.1, we needn't worry overmuch about
divergence from upstread sources.

I'd prefer the second path, even though it's more work for me, in that
it would hopefully result in more quickly reaching the state where all
of the MinGW support is in the FSF GDB. However, if the GDB maintainers
don't want to go that route, I'll just wait. I'd very much appreciate
advice from the GDB maintainers about which path to take.

Thanks,

--
Mark Mitchell
CodeSourcery, LLC
mark@codesourcery.com
(916) 791-8304