Re: Windows support in GDB

[Mark Mitchell <mark@codesourcery.com>]

Mark Kettenis wrote:
> Guys, I'm getting a bit of an uneasy feeling here.  It may be that I'm
> getting the wrong impression here, but I've seen quite a bit more
> Windows-related patches than I had in mind when Mark started submitted
> his first patches and said they were fairly limited and mostly some
> configure bits. 

I think that characterization was pretty accurate: most of the changes 
have been to configure bits -- I've littered #ifdef HAVE_FOO around the 
sources in more places, for the most part.  I think that's a pretty 
minimal intrusion; realistically, there's a lot of that anyhow in GDB, 
as even the various UNIX variants don't all define the same set of 
signals, etc.  In a couple of cases, stuff has gone into libiberty.

The other changes in GDB were the cleanup of ser-unix.c to create 
ser-base.c (which I think actually made the code cleaner), and the 
gdb_select function, which has the same API as POSIX.

I have no more changes for GDB proper, except a change to safe_strerror 
that's been rejected.  I'll either clean that up in some acceptable way, 
or abandon it.  All I've got left are readline patches.

> The problem here is that they mostly concern the
> non-POSIX nature of Windows

GCC (and the GNU project in general, I think) have taken the attitude 
that while free operating systems are definitely the primary target, 
it's OK to support other systems, including Windows, so that people who 
uses those systems have the benefit of GNU software, and so that they 
can see that it might be worthwhile switching to a GNU system.

Of course, it takes some work to support Windows, but -- thanks to your 
careful reviews -- the amount of impact on POSIX programmers from my 
patches is pretty nearly zero.  They might break Windows support, but 
they're not likely to get confused by the Windows bits, becuase they're 
so clearly segregated.

> It's fairly obvious that this development is coming from CodeSourcery.
> There's nothing wrong with that, but I'd like to ask CodeSourcery what
> their commitment to maintaining this new code is. 

We have customers that want this functionality.  We didn't do this work 
on spec from a single company; we did it because we have multiple 
customers who wanted it.  We distribute toolchains that use it, and have 
ongoing contracts to continue delivering such toolchains. We will be 
including this functionality in our nightly builds, once the FSF version 
works.

I'd also note that there's a very active MinGW community out there. 
Part of the reason that their GDB support is complete separate is that 
they've found it hard to get their patches contributed and accepted. 
I'd expect that once basic support is available, you'd see activity from 
that direction as well.

-- 
Mark Mitchell
CodeSourcery, LLC
mark@codesourcery.com
(916) 791-8304