Re: gdb.ini vs. .gdbinit on Cygwin

["Eli Zaretskii" <eliz at is dot elta dot co dot il>]

> Date: Tue, 13 Nov 2001 18:04:34 +0100
> From: Corinna Vinschen <vinschen@redhat.com>
> 
> We're talking about the Cygwin version.  A native DOS/Windows version
> can keep gdb.ini.

That would be a mistake, I think.  For starters, how would we explain
in the manual which versions of GDB use what file name for the init
file, without confusing the users?  It would be painful enough to
tell that DOS versions use gdb.ini while Windows versions use
.gdbinit, since the DOS version runs on Windows as well.

> However, we should use .gdbinit the same way as for
> any other host on Cygwin.  There's no reason to treat the Cygwin GDB
> special in that case.

Yes, there is: Cygwin executables run on Windows, not on Unix or
GNU/Linux.

> If you think it's really necessary, we can keep supporting gdb.ini
> as well but a Cygwin GDB doesn't have to take care for Explorer
> disabilities, IMO.

I'd suggest to take those disabilities into consideration.  Users
will bump into this whether you want it or not; when they do, you
will be harming your users, not Microsoft.

Personally, I like Fernando's suggestion: look for .gdbinit, and if
not found, look for gdb.ini.  I think this would satisfy everybody.

As another data point, consider this: the Windows port of Emacs looks
for .emacs first, and if not found, looks for _emacs (the name used
on DOS).

> As a resort we could
> begin to support an environment variable GDBINIT or similar which
> contains the name/path of the GDB init file.  That would have the
> advantage to be mostly host independent.

??? But GDB doesn't support $GDBINIT on other platforms, so this
suggestion seems to actually _introduce_ OS-specific features.  Is
this really a good idea?