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
