RE: trying to build gdb with renamed cygwin1.dll

Dave Korn
2007-04-30T20:12:45Z

On 30 April 2007 17:42, Fahd Abidi wrote:

> Actually I am planning on eventually building a cross debugger for
> arm/ppc/mips/xscale. But that will be afterwards. Right now I am just
> trying to get the gdb binary to be stand alone. Actually I had allot of
> success with building with the --disable-shared and --enable-static
> option and was able to move the resulting gdb across different versions
> of cygwin1.dll without it complain about using an incompatible version
> of cygwin1.dll.

You're putting an awful lot of effort into a mostly-imaginary problem.
Cygwin1.dll attempts to remain backwardly-compatible. The last ABI break I
was remember was something to do with the __reent_impure pointer and it
happened sometime back around 1.5.3 IIRC.

The one thing you can't do is carry around a copy of the cygwin dll that you
compiled against, and put gdb and that dll onto a system that already has a
different version of the dll installed; they will clash.

But you shouldn't need to do that anyway; if there's an exisiting cygwin
install, you just need to copy gdb.exe across. Apart from the occasional
break, as I mentioned above, /most/ versions of gdb compiled agsinst /most/
versions of the dll should work fine against /most/ other versions of the dll.
This is pretty much regardless of --disable-shared and --enable-static,
although if you compiled gdb against a very old or very new cygwin and the one
you're running it on doesn't have some of the same versions of the support
dlls you might find it's missing something, e.g. cygintl-1 vs. cygintl-2.
However, there's no compatibility problems between the differently-numbered
versions of the support dlls, so you should be able to carry a set of those
around and just leave out cygwin1.dll and get what you want.

Give it a try if you haven't yet. If you have, plese post the /exact/ error
message, so we can be clear precisely what situation you're talking about.

cheers,
DaveK
--
Can't think of a witty .sigline today....