Re: Windows support in GDB

Daniel Jacobowitz
2005-04-29T16:47:56Z

On Fri, Apr 29, 2005 at 12:00:40PM -0400, Christopher Faylor wrote:
> Of course it does build "out of the box" on Windows right now if you
> have cygwin.

Sorry, very bad choice of wording on my part.

> While I am the Windows maintainer for gdb, I have been thinking that
> maybe I might have to step down if it means that I'll have to support a
> Windows configuration for which I have little interest.

That would definitely suck! If you are uninterested in MinGW support
(perfectly reasonable) then I'd prefer that you clarify your
maintenance to just cover Cygwin. You do a great job for Cygwin, and
the big reason we've been bugging you about Windows patches is that you
seem to know more about it than we do :-)

> I haven't asked what the problem is with just using cygwin with gdb.
> I suspect that the standard two problems are:
>
> 1) cygwin is "slow" (which really only is an issue for configure/make)

Our customers have found, I think, that this is true for more than just
shell/fork-heavy loads; it was also true for GCC. Treat this as
hearsay, though. I've never measured it myself.

> and
>
> 2) You can't trivially include your own version of cygwin1.dll with
> a distribution since it could conflict with a version already on
> the system.
>
> I can't do much to address 1 but 2 is not an insurmountable problem.

Sure. But I somewhat approve of mingw-only installations because of
the number of times I've installed a vendor's carelessly packaged
cygwin tools and had them trash my existing Cygwin installation. I do
use Cygwin, so that ticks me off :-) It's not an insurmountable
problem but people seem to have a great deal of trouble surmounting it.

--
Daniel Jacobowitz
CodeSourcery, LLC