Re: Windows support in GDB

["Eli Zaretskii" <eliz at gnu dot org>]

> Date: Fri, 29 Apr 2005 09:43:35 -0700
> From: Mark Mitchell <mark@codesourcery.com>
> CC: paul@codesourcery.com,  gdb@sourceware.org
> 
> Christopher Faylor wrote:
> 
> > However, now that the patches are finally here, I have to say that I
> > sort of share Mark K's concerns.  I'm wondering if we are on a slippery
> > slope and (to mix a metaphor) will be subjecting gdb to a
> > death-by-inches as we slowly add ifdefs throughout the configury and
> > code.
> 
> I think it's a funny time to get concerned -- we're done. :-)  There are 
> no more cuts coming, so as long as we're not bleeding to death yet, 
> we're not going to die.  Plenty of GNU software has similar patches to 
> support running on MinGW.  GDB itself already has 2500 lines of code in 
> win32-nat.c, some of which I would imagine is rather more opaque to 
> POSIX programmers than anything we've added.
> 
> We made these changes with no algorithmic modifications to GDB, no 
> perversions of its core design, etc.

FWIW, I agree with Mark M. here: the changes added to support MinGW
were minimal, almost unnoticed in the sources.

> I certainly don't think the entire codebase will be littered with 
> HANDLEs and ReadFileEx, or transformed into a multi-threaded application 
> with a Windows event loop in the middle of it, or anything like that.

Perhaps we should have a mingw.c file to hide any such code, should
there be a need in the future.  Not that I see a need for that now,
except maybe to put there the gdb_select emulation.