Re: RFA: Support Windows extended error numbers in safe_strerror

Mark Kettenis
2006-02-09T14:40:25Z

> On Thu, Feb 09, 2006 at 12:10:26AM +0100, Mark Kettenis wrote:
>> I'd rather see us drop the attempt to support MinGW, but if we don't I
>> want to make sure the MinGW support is integrated in such a way that
>> its impact on the rest of the code is as small as possible.
>
> Will you be satisfied with the changes you've described? I am
> completely wiling to work on the technical issues, but if you remain
> antagonistic to the very concept, then I'm wasting my time. Again.
> For the sixth or seventh time.

Trust me, I would not be proposing these changes just to make you do extra
work. Yes, if things are changed the way I describe, that would make them
acceptable to me.

> We need to decide this now. I, and I think Mark Mitchell also, are
> heartily sick of contributing these patches, spending days revising
> them to satisfy other developers, and then being told the port
> shouldn't exist at all. There's a flamewar every time we post one;
> that's mighty good incentive to leave the port broken.

Sorry, but from Mark's first batch of patches I got the impression that
Codesourcery was contributing well-tested code and no further changes would
be necessary. I certainly had the impression that we'd get MinGW almost
for free. Turns out now that this was too good to be true :(.

If I had known all of this beforehand, I'd probably put up more resistance
at that time. It seems that nearly all global maintainers still think MinGW
support is worth the additional cost, but I had to make sure we realise that
there *is* a cost. I'm sorry if this frustrated you and Mark; I can
certainly image it would frsutrate me if I were in a similar situation.
I would certainly appreciate it if you would address my concerns.

Mark