Re: Building Elfutils with Mingw32

[Mark Wielaard <mark@klomp.org>]

Hi Colin, Hi Ulf,

On Thu, Sep 14, 2023 at 07:44:08PM +0000, McAllister, Colin via Elfutils-devel wrote:
> I did see that there were quite a few patches sent to the ML toward the end of 2022 that attempted to add Windows support.
> https://sourceware.org/pipermail/elfutils-devel/2022q4/005449.html
> https://sourceware.org/pipermail/elfutils-devel/2022q4/005667.html
> 
> It looks like some of the patches were merged, but quite a few were never applied. I'm wondering if it'd be possible to finish adding support upstream such that a fork would no longer be needed?
> 
> I would be happy to help contribute however I can.

Thanks. It would be nice if elfutils was a bit more portable.  The
trouble is that not many people have that much experience with
Windows.  At least I have none.  When reviewing these patches I always
get really confused. And I don't fully understand the use case. Given
that Windows doesn't even use ELF why would you even want elfutils on
such a platform? And why aren't people simply using cygwin for such a
port. Without it you don't even have a normal POSIX like system. And
when using mingw do people still use a normal gcc compiler (to cross
build)? Or is the goal to build with some alternative windows
compiler?

But all that really is my confusion. It does make reviewing these
change proposals really hard though. Because I often don't know
whether some abstraction is really needed. And I do worry about
unnecessary abstractions/ifdefs/code because it is unclear how to
maintain them long term if I am not sure why.

But if there is consensus (among the Windows hackers) about using one
common target for the port then maybe we should have an official
branch on sourceware?

Also there is a mingw container setup on builder.sourceware.org which
we might use for doing CI on the port?
https://sourceware.org/cgit/builder/tree/builder/containers/Containerfile-fedora-mingw

Thanks,

Mark