Re: RFA: Support Windows extended error numbers in safe_strerror

[Christopher Faylor <me at cgf dot cx>]

On Sat, Feb 04, 2006 at 05:13:41PM +0200, Eli Zaretskii wrote:
>>Date: Sat, 4 Feb 2006 15:35:06 +0100 (CET)
>>From: Mark Kettenis
>>
>>My objections are mostly techincal, or easthetical if you want to call
>>it that.  Having two different versions of support code for what's in
>>the end the same platform is silly.
>
>But it isn't the same platform, anymore than MIPS/Linux and MIPS/Irix
>are the same platform.  Cygwin requires a considerable amount of
>additional software to be installed, of which a large part is a system
>library that presents a very different API than the native OS.

The minimal amount of software required for gdb to run with cygwin is:
gdb.exe, cygwin1.dll, cygiconv-2.dll, and cygncurses-8.dll .  You may
potentially need to have the terminfo library installed, too, don't know
for sure, and I'm not really interested in testing.  I wouldn't call
that a considerable amount of software.

You are apparently confusing the cygwin distribution with the cygwin
DLL.  That's like conflating Fedora Core 5 with the linux kernel.
However, even if you're installing a minimal cygwin distribution + gdb
it still should not fall into the category of "a considerable amount of
additional software".  Also, there is nothing in cygwin which stops you
from running native windows apps (e.g., a mingw version of gcc) if that
is your preference.

I am well aware of all of the usual arguments which are raised when the
use of the cygwin DLL is mentioned but I don't think you can really make
the case that the Cygwin version of gdb requires a considerable amount
of software to run.

cgf