[PATCH 1/1] gdb: Deprecate stabs debug info

Guinevere Larsen
2025-01-13T18:14:42Z

GCC has deprecated stabs generation in GCC 12 and entirely removed it in
GCC 13, which was released in April 2023. At the time it was proposed
that GDB deprecate stabs as well, but the decision was to support it a
bit longer. With this patch, it'll be deprecated on GDB 17, and removed
on GDB 18, which following the current cadence, will be released early
2026, meaning we will have supported stabs for nearly 3 years longer
than GCC, which I think is reasonable.

As pointed out in the previous discussion on this topic[1], there are
several existing issues on the code, and none of the current maintainers
knows how to fix it. Unless someone steps up to fix this before the
removal on GDB 18, I don't see why we should keep this old code that
breaks all conventions of modern debuginfo readers and doesn't even
work, instead of being able to further advance adjacent code.

[1] https://inbox.sourceware.org/gdb-patches/20230119174156.654402-1-tom@tromey.com/
---
gdb/NEWS | 3 +++
1 file changed, 3 insertions(+)

diff --git a/gdb/NEWS b/gdb/NEWS
index f454846646e..685ecefbe1c 100644
--- a/gdb/NEWS
+++ b/gdb/NEWS
@@ -44,6 +44,9 @@ maintenance check symtabs
** New constant PARAM_COLOR represents color type of a value
of a <gdb:parameter> object. Parameter's value is <gdb::color> instance.

+* Support for stabs debugging format is deprecates, and will be
+ removed in GDB 18.
+
*** Changes in GDB 16

* Support for Nios II targets has been removed as this architecture
--
2.47.1