[kaffe] Cygwin signal handling (or lack thereof) and kaffe cvs

Nicholas Wourms nwourms at myrealbox.com
Fri Nov 7 06:46:02 PST 2003


Hi,

I just went to try the latest kaffe cvs, when I noticed a critical issue 
in the build process.  What, may I ask, are those of us using Cygwin 
supposed to do now that there is a `#error' directive in our md.h?  I 
assure you that sigcontext will *NOT* be implemented anytime soon 
(trying to emulate POSIX signals via Windows signals is extremely 
complicated).  I'm also certain this will also affect other non-linux 
platforms which use newlib.  Why can't kaffe fall back to the prior 
signal handling when sigcontext is absent instead of being so heavy 
handed as to drop an #error directive (like it used to)?  Tons of other, 
possibly more complex, projects seem to cope quite will without advanced 
signal handling.  So what makes it so necessary now?  Yes, I understand 
that java needs access to lowlevel routines at times, but you don't see 
this approach being done in libjava/gcj.  IMHO, these recent changes 
make kaffe terribly unportable, which is something I thought most 
developers strive to avoid.  Sorry if this sounds negative, but previous 
efforts led me to believe that making kaffe portable was one of its goals.

Cheers,
Nicholas





More information about the kaffe mailing list