Re: Building Elfutils with Mingw32

[Mark Wielaard <mark@klomp.org>]

Hi,

On Mon, 2023-09-18 at 13:18 +0000, McAllister, Colin via Elfutils-devel
wrote:
> > There is a large number of developers who build software for ELF-based
> > embedded systems on windows and test/debug/profile/deploy it over some
> > network or USB connection. Those people want to have elfutils for their
> > debugging and profiling. They want to use elfutils on the host (the windows
> > box) because that is much faster.
> 
> This is also our use case. I support developers that use Windows on their host PC to develop Embedded Linux applications. I’m currently exploring options to provide Windows users the same development tooling to use GDB with Debuginfod for them to be able to debug Embedded Linux applications.
> 
> > Those people are not me and I'm not talking about sanity.
> 
> Likewise 😊
>  
> > > And why aren't people simply using cygwin for such a port?
> > 
> > If we built perfparser with cygwin, the people who use it would also need
> > cygwin. People building embedded devices generally have a colorful mess of
> > different tools, none of which you can rely on in advance. I haven't
> > considered shipping cygwin with perfparser. Is that actually possible? It looks
> > like it needs some installation procedure I would have to burden the user
> > with.
> 
> I would prefer to use MinGW instead of Cygwin.

So for those people preferring MinGW over Cygwin you still need some
posix/linux compatibility layer. It isn't clear to me what that needs
to be. It seems to become very complicated very quickly. For example
there is this patch series:

https://patchwork.sourceware.org/project/elfutils/list/?series=15310&state=*

I have reviewed and pushed various of those patches where they made
sense (to me). But as you can see there are various patches that were
just rejected and others where I really don't understand the real
issue/solution.

If someone could help reviewing those that would be really appreciated.

Thanks,

Mark