Re: [PATCH] gdb/Windows testsuite: Embed asInvoker manifest in test executables

[Eli Zaretskii <eliz@gnu.org>]

> Date: Fri, 10 Jul 2026 19:59:17 +0100
> Cc: gdb-patches@sourceware.org
> From: Pedro Alves <pedro@palves.net>
> 
> It's curious that you bring up patch.exe.  In the downstream testcase
> I mention, the initial comment that I wrote there mentioned "patch" as "bad"
> word too (as some docs somewhere mention it), and then after the initial fix,
> I noticed that "patch" is actually OK, and so I dropped it from the comment
> in a follow up patch.

It used to be a problem in some older builds of Windows 11 (and nasty
one not even a manifest could work around it), but ceased to be a
problem a few system updates ago.  I have no idea what is the
situation on Windows 10, though.

>  $ mv update.exe patch.exe
>  $ ./patch.exe
>  Hello!
> 
> So looks like Microsoft decided that "patch" wasn't a bad word after all
> at some point more recently...

Yes.  But do we want to rely on the test suite being run only on the
latest builds of Windows?

> Also, I noticed that executables produced by the GCC 16 that comes with
> MSYS2 do not have the issue. (??!)  Digging a bit, it turns out that both MSYS2 and
> Cygwin ship a default-manifest.o object file that GCC pulls in via a spec file.
> This default-manifest.o file is in a separate optional package, which may be
> removed, and GCC keeps working, just won't link in the default manifest.
> 
>   https://gcc.gnu.org/legacy-ml/gcc-patches/2014-04/msg01378.html
>   https://sourceforge.net/p/mingw-w64/wiki2/default_manifest/

Thanks, that's good to know.

> Find below the new patch adding a manifest to every executable in the testsuite.  WDYT of this one?

LGTM.

> +    # Embed our manifest file.  Pass it in Windows-native form.
> +    # MSYS2's argument conversion treats a "/foo:/bar" argument as a
> +    # colon-separated list of POSIX paths and mistakenly rewrites it
> +    # to a semicolon-separated list of Windows paths.  E.g.:
> +    #
> +    #  "/manifestinput:/c/gdb/.../windows.manifest"
> +    #    =>
> +    #  "C:\msys64\manifestinput;C:\gdb\...\windows.manifest"
> +    #
> +    # I.e., the flag name itself gets converted as if it were a path,
> +    # and the ":" becomes ";".
> +    #
> +    # What triggers the conversion is the value after the colon looking
> +    # like an absolute POSIX path (a leading "/").  "/manifest:embed"
> +    # above is left alone because "embed" doesn't.  Passing the value
> +    # as a native "C:/..." path likewise avoids it.
> +    set manifest [host_file_normalize ${srcdir}/lib/windows.manifest]
> +    lappend ldflags ldflags=-Wl,/manifestinput:${manifest}

IME, you can work around this incorrect conversion by setting
MSYS_NO_PATHCONV=1.