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

Andrew Burgess
2025-01-14T17:59:39Z

Guinevere Larsen <guinevere@redhat.com> writes:

> 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.

I'm in favour of this. Like Tom said, lets give folk a chance to object
before merging this, but hopefully this should allow removal of some old
code.

Approved-By: Andrew Burgess <aburgess@redhat.com>

Thanks,
Andrew

>
> [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