Re: [RFA/DWARF] Add DW_AT_GNAT_descriptive_type support

[Jan Kratochvil <jan.kratochvil@redhat.com>]

On Thu, 24 Dec 2009 23:39:43 -1000, Jan Kratochvil wrote:
> There is DW_TAG_array_type(DW_TAG_subrange_type->DW_AT_type) for this purpose
> IMHO.  But yes, you have said it is possible to do it the DWARF way.
> 
> 
> On Fri, 25 Dec 2009 05:06:46 +0100, Joel Brobecker wrote:
> > But this effort seems to be always stalled in favor of other, more urgent
> > ones.  It's an effort that is actually dear to me, since I very much dislike
> > this encoding.
> 
> OK, np, fine with me, fully understood.  I just missed some note about the
> reasons for this patch.


On Mon, 11 Jan 2010 19:52:58 -1000, Joel Brobecker wrote:
> This will be adjusted later on, when support is added to GCC.


The regression today and some recent talk suggested me to revive this thread.

People developing non-Ada GDB code sometimes accidentally cause Ada
regressions but the current Ada debug info (at least as encoded in DWARF) is
unreadable for me, despite I tried.

Is there some Ada-specific `readelf -wi'-like tool to be able to read it?

And why not to implement whole Ada properly in DWARF, with few extensions
proposed at <dwarf-discuss@lists.dwarfstd.org> when/if needed?  As AdaCore
supplies both the compiler and the debugger I see no need to be bound by STABS
you noted before.

As Ada regressions are AFAIK not acceptable for FSF GDB check-ins there should
be a way to make them troubleshootable by non-Ada developers.


Thanks,
Jan