Re: [PATCH] Accept DWARF 3-format debug info

[Julian Brown <julian@codesourcery.com>]

Eli Zaretskii wrote:
>>Cc: gdb-patches@sourceware.org,  Daniel Jacobowitz <dan@codesourcery.com>
>>From: Jim Blandy <jimb@codesourcery.com>
>>Date: Thu, 08 Jun 2006 16:25:42 -0700
>>
>>I think this patch is right.  It's true that GDB doesn't support all
>>of DWARF 3, but GDB's general philosophy is to garner as much
>>information as it can, and punt the rest, which works well with
>>DWARF's philosophy.  So GDB shouldn't just punt entire compilation
>>units because they're marked as DWARF 3.
> 
> 
> I agree with the philosophy, but the devil is usually in the
> details...
> 
> In this case, what will happen when GDB sees a DWARF-3 feature it
> doesn't yet support?  I think we should make sure it displays a
> warning message, instead of throwing an internal error (or some
> similar fatal reaction).

AIUI, the ideal is to just ignore the bits of DWARF which aren't yet 
understood, though I don't know how well that works in practice. The 
partial-unit case certainly causes unpleasant crashes at present, but 
I'd hope that that's an exception rather than a rule. (I, or one of the 
other sourcerers, may get to that particular case later.)

Cheers,

Julian