Re: [RFC 0/9] Unify windows specifics into common/windows-hdep files

[Christopher Faylor <cgf-use-the-mailinglist-please at sourceware dot org>]

On Wed, Mar 30, 2011 at 02:04:22PM +0200, Pierre Muller wrote:
>   This series of patches tries to unify all windows conversion routines
>and ASCII/WIDE versions of Windows API routines into two new files:
>
>common/windows-hdep.h
>and
>common.windows-hdep.c
>
>Main points are:
>
>  Try to be able to avoid as much as possible
>#ifdef __CYGWIN__
>and
>#ifdef __USEWIDE
>in gdb sources and especially in gdb/windows-nat.c
>
>  The new files should allow to choose between ASCII or WIDE
>versions of Windows API based on
>  USE_WIDE_WINAPI macro declaration.
>
>  This macro is defined by default for newer Cygwin 1.7.X versions
>only, all other hosts use ASCII by default.
>
>This includes:
>1) older Cygwin 1.5.X which does not support wide version of path
>conversion routine, and for which trying to set USE_WIDE_WINAPI will
>generate a compile time error.
>
>2) mingw32 and mingw64 hosts, which should with this patch be
>compilable both with ASCII (default) and WIDE (by adding
>-DUSE_WIDE_WINAPI to CFLAGS).

I don't see the above as compelling reasons for this major change.
You're introducing a large patch set for what I'd consider a fairly
minor goal.  I don't consider the current #ifdefs in windows-nat.c that
onerous.

As the maintainer for the Windows version of GDB and one of the
maintainers of Cygwin I'd like to officially just decree that we no
longer support Cygwin 1.5 in newer versions of GDB.  This is related
to my reluctance to do hoop jumping in gdb to support things in native
Windows that we have worked around in Cygwin.

Again, I'm not interested in spending any time accommodating Cygwin 1.5.
It is unsupported.  Working hard to keep it supported is going in the
wrong direction.

If we really do want to spend time gaining the advantages of longer
pathnames and internationalization then, once we no longer support
Cygwin 1.5, the decision should be fairly clear: Just use wide
characters throughout.  Keeping an "ascii" version around doesn't make
much sense to me.

Oh, wrt accommodating the msys shell, I'm vetoing the idea right now.
I'm not interested in adding gdb support for another barely-supported
version of Cygwin.  Again, I like to confine my head-standing to Cygwin
itself.

cgf