Re: RFA: Support Windows extended error numbers in safe_strerror

[Eli Zaretskii <eliz@gnu.org>]

> Date: Fri, 3 Feb 2006 22:27:30 -0500
> From: Daniel Jacobowitz <drow@false.org>
> 
> What I'd _love_ to do is refactor the bits of Cygwin which we need,
> which are considerably smaller than the whole of Cygwin, so that we
> could link them directly into GDB and not have to worry about it any
> more.  Given the copyright status of Cygwin, however, I think this is a
> non-starter.  I'm not even sure whether it would fit into the design
> of Cygwin, or end up rewriting much of it anyway.

I think this should be possible, using as the starting point the MinGW
port of glibc (libgw32c from the GnuWin32 download server at
http://prdownloads.sourceforge.net/gnuwin32).  The problem (at least
my problem) is that Some Work Is Needed(tm) to add the missing bits to
that library, e.g. their `select' is a stab that always fails.  So, if
someone wants to go that way, they will need to free some non-trivial
amount of time for the job.

> The question of Windows support is not going to go away at any point in
> the foreseeable future.  If the GDB community is going to throw up its
> hands and say ugh, well, I'd be pretty disappointed.

Me too.  When I work on Windows, I use the MinGW port of GCC
exclusively, even though there's a ``free'' (as in "free beer")
Microsoft compiler one can download from the net.  Not having a good
port of GDB would be a deadly blow for me, and installing Cygwin is
not an option, because I still need to use native Windows programs.

> And CodeSourcery would be maintaining a branch with these patches
> for all of that foreseeable future, and shipping it.

Would CodeSourcery consider supporting a MinGW specific port, along
the lines I suggested elsewhere in this thread (i.e., having a
separate -nat.c file and other files as needed)?  If you will, and if
that support is consistent with the GPL, then I think we can have
everybody happy.