GDB 8.0 release / imminent branching? (2017-04-10)

Joel Brobecker
2017-04-11T01:18:07Z

Hello,

We're now about 4 weeks after our tentative branching date, and
I am concerned that if we continue to wait for some of the pending
issues to be resolved, we'll have new issues appearing on master
that'll might delay the branching further. So I'd like to propose
we branch in the next couple of days, and then backport fixes,
so as to stabilize the branch.

We have two 8.0 pending PRs:

* server/21169 GDBServer on ARM can crash the inferior while single stepping

Antoine indicated that he's working on it, and his expected
completion date isn't all that far away. Still on track for
that, Antoine?

* build/21187 Static linking of libstdc++ and libgcc with GDB leads to broken exception handling on AIX platform

For this one, I think the feedback so far is a question about
the fact that this is only a work around. Parallel to that,
did I see a thread where people are discussing a real fix
for the exception handling issue?

So, perhaps we might not need the GDB patch after all?
Is there a version of GCC capable of compiling GDB 8.x
on AiX?

Then, there is the issue of the Python APIs for record and btrace.
It sounds like we're getting close? Perhaps what we could do is
also backport the changes once the an agreement has been reached?

And finally, there is the build-bot. I'm having trouble using
the interface and understanding whether the current overall
state is rather positive or negative. Sergio, would you be able
to help me? If all good, I could create the branch with a SHA1
that you'd give me!

Thank you!
--
Joel