Re: RFA: Support Windows extended error numbers in safe_strerror

Joel Brobecker
2006-02-09T00:12:57Z

> I always understood having two different versions of a DLL with the
> same name as being the "DLL hell" problem. Am I wrong? I can't
> believe that in the last 10 years that people have been talking about
> this problem, MicroSoft didn't come up with a solution for it. And
> even if they didn't, the solution is simple: just ship the Cygwin
> DLL's under a different name. Or just link the Cygwin code
> statically. Or is that impossible on Windows?

I honestly think it's impossible with the current design of cygwin.
The problem is that you can only have one cygwin library at a time
mapped in the system. No amount of renaming will let you workaround
that issue. So as soon as you build GDB against cygwin, you run into
a distribution problem that cannot be fixed.

We've tried. Believe, we've tried very hard to come with a satisfactory
solution that involves cygwin.

Cygwin provides a really nice environment, and many engineers here
use it heavily. But it comes with its own tradeoffs, and some of them
made us decide to try to go back to MinGW. I therefore support, for
the little it is worth, Daniel's efforts into contributing their patches.

--
Joel