Re: Windows support in GDB

[Christopher Faylor <me@cgf.cx>]

On Fri, Apr 29, 2005 at 12:45:08PM -0400, Daniel Jacobowitz wrote:
>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 :-)

Hopefully, I do know a lot about Windows programming (unfortunately).
Maintaining cygwin means knowing a lot about Windows and UNIX.

I guess the thought of coming up with a solution in cygwin that has to
be dealt with in a different fashion in gdb/mingw is a little daunting.
However, I'm not going anywhere.  I'm calmed down now.  :-)

>> 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.

It seems like my point wasn't clear here.  I know that cygwin is slow.

I'm talking about just using gdb for debugging.  If your customers are
routinely rebuilding gdb, then the slowness would be an issue.  If they
are not, then unless cygwin was adding some kind of 10x slowdown to
debugging, I don't see why it would be an issue.

>> 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.

No argument there.  It is a continual source of frustration.

cgf