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Date: Tue, 17 Oct 2000 12:50:06 -0400
Message-Id: <200010171650.MAA12359@envy.delorie.com>
From: DJ Delorie <dj AT delorie DOT com>
To: jik AT curl DOT com
CC: earnie_boyd AT yahoo DOT com, starksb AT ebi DOT ac DOT uk, cygwin AT sources DOT redhat DOT com
In-reply-to: <20001017153855.2548.qmail@lizard.curl.com> (message from
	Jonathan Kamens on 17 Oct 2000 11:38:55 -0400)
Subject: Re: rxvt SEGV (Win98, 1.1.5s/2000-10-08)
References: <20001017152857 DOT 19990 DOT qmail AT web114 DOT yahoomail DOT com> <20001017153855 DOT 2548 DOT qmail AT lizard DOT curl DOT com>


> Surely you're not asserting that "using common debugging methods [to]
> figure out what's wrong" within the complex internals of Cygwin is an
> easy task.

If gdb works, it should be:

$ gdb hello.exe
...
(gdb) run
...
(gdb) thread 1
(gdb) where

It used to be harder, but gdb has come a long way recently.  That
doesn't mean the *bugs* are easy to solve, but at least the tools
should work easily.

> His opinion is that the Cygwin developers have always been a bit
> sloppy about handling the issues that arise on MP machines.

I do *all* my cygwin development on a dual PII/300 running NT4.  Be
assured that MP bugs are going to hit me.  However, I use cygwin a lot
each day, and haven't had any problems in a long time (except the ones
I'm actively creating, of course ;).

Debugging MP race conditions is hard.  Because of the way they die,
it's difficult to attach gdb to an already-running (well,
already-hung) process and get meaningful data from it.  The most
important thing we need is either a reproducible test case, or a clear
explanation of what's wrong and why.  Changing things without good
cause, especially MP problems, is not an effective way of fixing
things.

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