Re: RFA: Support Windows extended error numbers in safe_strerror

Christopher Faylor
2006-02-05T22:33:54Z

On Sun, Feb 05, 2006 at 04:56:59PM -0500, Daniel Jacobowitz wrote:
>On Sun, Feb 05, 2006 at 04:50:36PM -0500, Christopher Faylor wrote:
>>On Sun, Feb 05, 2006 at 03:22:22PM -0500, Daniel Jacobowitz wrote:
>>>On Sun, Feb 05, 2006 at 10:19:12PM +0200, Eli Zaretskii wrote:
>>>>>The shell is needed for the "shell" command. The shell is not used for
>>>>>running programs.
>>>>
>>>>The latter is unlike on Posix platforms, right?
>>>
>>>That is an implementation artifact that, IMO, we desperately need to
>>>move away from. It's a continual source of trouble from e.g.
>>>unexpected variable settings in shell initialization files, and it's an
>>>aggravating (to me) external dependency for GDB.
>>
>>I did try to implement this artifact in Cygwin once but I never got it
>>right.
>>
>>Isn't the shell used to allow redirection and shell-like quoting from
>>the gdb command-line? Lack of redirection, at least, is an occasional
>>complaint about gdb-under-cygwin.
>
>That's right; and we certainly can't ditch that support. But what we
>do today is pass the command line arguments directly to a shell, which
>means all sorts of worrying about quoting, and also means that we get
>Bourne shell behavior if the user has an appropriate $SHELL, or C shell
>if they're using csh/tcsh, et cetera. I don't know if anyone takes
>advantage of that as a feature, but it's sure confusing!
>
>I keep telling myself we ought to somehow get rid of this, but I'm
>fuzzy on the details.

I'm feeling deja vu here. I suspect that we've probably discussed this
before. :-)

If so, I probably said something like "Maybe we could just standardize
on /bin/bash quoting and redirection rules and put a shell-like command
parser in gdb."

cgf