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

[Pedro Alves <pedro_alves@portugalmail.pt>]

Nikolay Molchanov wrote:
> Eli,
> 
>>> Date: Tue, 08 Aug 2006 12:20:36 -0700
>>> From: Nikolay Molchanov <Nikolay.Molchanov@Sun.COM>
>>> Cc: gdb@sourceware.org
>>>
>>> Eli, the executable is built by Cygwin gcc,, but I don't know how to
>>> find out the file name and the compilation directory actually recorded
>>> in the debug info of the executable. Which command prints this info?
>>>   
>>
>> One way that should work is "strings -a foo.exe".  You should see the
>> name of each of your source files (either with or without a leading
>> directory) and right after each file name the directory which was the
>> current when you compiled that file.  Please show both the file names
>> and the directories that follow them.
>>  
>>
> Yes, it prints the directory with /cygdrive/:
> 
> bash-3.1$ strings -a t1-g.exe | grep t1
> t1.c
> /cygdrive/c/users/nik/t1/
> 
>>  
>>
>>> And the main problem with file names in Cygwin format is that Java
>>> does not understand such names, so we have to translate them to
>>> Windows format, which is not a trivial task in general case, because
>>> there could be many mounted filesystems, like "/tmp/...",
>>> "/usr/include/..."
>>> and so on.
>>>   
>>
>> In general, if you want to avoid such problems, you should be using a
>> coherent set of tools.  Which in practice means that a Cygwin build
>> of GDB should be used with Cygwin front ends and other programs.  If
>> your front end cannot be built with Cygwin, you might consider using
>> the MinGW GCC and GDB instead, which are native Windows executables
>> and understand Windows-style d:/foo file names.
>>  
>>
> Yes, we will try to support these compilers as well in future, but our 
> primary
> target is to provide a free open source IDE for java and C/C++ developers,
> and this IDE shall work with Cygwin compilers on Windows, and with many
> other compilers on Linux, Windows and Solaris. This IDE is based on 
> Netbeans
> (http://netbeans.org), which is a Java application, and it is very 
> inconvenient to
> translate file names from Cygwin format to Windows format in Java code.
> For gdb it takes a few microseconds to translate a file name. We have to
> spend 250-400 milliseconds to execute external binary "cygpath -m ..."
> and to get translated name from its output. We can try to cache the
> directory names, but it is not correct in general case because mount
> points can be changed, and there is no way to notice such change
> from Java application. So, if it is possible to provide an option to
> print fullname in Windows format, we will very much appreciate it.
> 

Hummm, how about?:
You could avoid the external executable loading time everytime you want 
to convert a path, by keeping one "cygpath -m -f -" loaded, and feeding 
it the pathnames to stdin / getting result from stdout.

Cheers,
Pedro Alves