Re: Windows support in GDB

Christopher Faylor
2005-05-02T19:56:42Z

On Mon, May 02, 2005 at 10:00:39PM +0300, Eli Zaretskii wrote:
>>Date: Sun, 1 May 2005 17:41:28 -0400
>>From: Christopher Faylor <me@cgf.cx>
>>
>>>In fact, any serious use of GDB will almost instantly bump into such a
>>>consistency (or lack thereof) issue. For example, will the `edit' and
>>>`shell' commands work if I don't have a Cygwin Bash installed and GDB
>>>is configured to invoke that Bash as the shell?
>>
>>And, if they don't, what's the solution? You fix it so they will work.
>>Presumably, if there is no /bin/sh.exe available, you'd use a fallback.
>>You could even implement a switch to force cygwin's gdb into "windows
>>path mode".
>
>You could do all that and more, but AFAIK that'd be against the
>``spirit of Cygwin'', which is to solve all incompatibilities in the
>runtime, and leave the application sources more or less intact.

You don't need to worry about the spirit of cygwin. I am one of the
project leaders for Cygwin and I'm implying that patches to make gdb
more pure "windows-friendly" would be accepted.

gdb already has massive windows-specific accommodations due to the fact
that cygwin doesn't try to emulate a UNIX-like debugger interface. gdb
already allows 'x:\y' style paths. I can see why people might want to
use cygwin's gdb as a windows debugger without requiring a full cygwin
installation (if for no other reason than it might be useful for
debugging cygwin itself) so I am saying that I would support the
inclusion of these types of patches.

Perhaps this seems inconsistent for the Cygwin project lead but as the
gdb windows maintainer, I think it makes good sense.

cgf