Re: Why gdb 6.5 prints fullname in /cygdrive/... format om Windows?

[Christopher Faylor <cgf-use-the-mailinglist-please@cygwin.com>]

On Wed, Aug 09, 2006 at 11:18:19AM -0700, Joel Brobecker wrote:
>>Of course, don't count on this working.  The GDB could easily be built
>>on Cygwin, and the cygwin1.dll delivered.  In this case there will be
>>no cygpath, and your front end won't work.
>
>Just FYI, and Chris might contradict me, but delivering cygwin1.dll
>introduces some issues that are not necessarily easy to overcome.

Nope.  You are spot on, Joel.  And, thanks for offering independent
verification of this point.

>One of them is compatibility when the end user already has a cygwin
>installation present on his system.  When that happens, very often the
>two will not be able to coexist at the same time and the user may see
>error messages saying that the application could not be loaded because
>of such issues.  We've been able to work around this problem so far by
>having the cygwin install and our debugger use the same one (which one
>do you choose?), but I think it might be a risky practice.

There are issues involved with using two versions of cygwin1.dll on the
same system and they can manifest no matter how much binary editing you
do or source code modification you do.  It is safest to have only the
most recent version on your system.

Cygwin wasn't designed to be distributed as a standalone DLL.  While
you can do that, this practice, like the use of MS-DOS paths is not
something that is guaranteed to work 100% correctly.

cgf