Re: [RFA/mingw32] environment variables are case-insensitive on win32

Joel Brobecker
2012-12-10T13:50:07Z

> No, it's not. The Windows environment is NOT case insensitive, it's
> case-preserving. That's a big difference. A process inherits the
> environment in exactly the same case as has been used by its parent.

I would like to pause this discussion about cygwin for a second,
here: I am concerned that we are slowly allowing ourselves to
hold Jerome's patch, which works on MinGW, because it does not fix
the problem on cygwin.

Jerome is happy to try to help if it's not too time consuming,
but it is starting to look like things are far from simple in
this case.

This is why I propose we do 2 things:

1. Decide whether we want GDB to match environment variable names
using case-sensitive or case-insensentive functions on cygwin.
Right now, it's case-sensitive. FWIW, we are offering to change
that behavior, and it seems more user-friencly at the moment,
but either choice is fine with me. If no concensus can be reached
on this, then we'll revert to the original behavior.

2. Commit Jerome's patch which implements the decision from (1),
letting a more elaborate handling of environment variables
as a followup patch for someone more involved in cygwin than
we are.

Thanks,
--
Joel