Re: GDB w/ Mac OS cores: "no core file handler recognizes format"

Paul Smith
2014-01-31T18:41:15Z

On Fri, 2014-01-31 at 10:18 -0800, Stan Shebs wrote:
> On 1/30/14 11:58 PM, Matt Rice wrote:
> > On Thu, Jan 30, 2014 at 7:20 PM, Klee Dienes <klee@mit.edu> wrote:
>
> (Hi Klee!_
>
> >> There should still be a copyright assignment on file for the time
> period it was written
> >
> > I think we need to be wary that copyright on file for the time period
> > may not mean that the copyright for that specific piece of code was
> > assigned, and note apples unwillingness to do so in the past.
>
> No, Apple had a blanket assignment to the FSF for all of their GNU work.
> Presumably it's still in effect, but it's not something that could be
> rescinded retroactively, so old code unaffected in any case.

So the idea is that it should be possible to get the last GDB version
provided by Apple (this was GDB 6.3.x with Xcode 4.x I think), bring the
core dump handling code under FSF copyright due to the blanket
assignment, and port it to the newer GDB?

The latest GDB binary I have from Apple is GNU gdb 6.3.50-20050815
(Apple version gdb-1824) (from Xcode 4.6.3). It looks like the source
for this version is available here:

http://www.opensource.apple.com/tarballs/gdb/gdb-1824.tar.gz

For now maybe I'll just build this version myself; it doesn't have all
the latest GDB goodness but it's got to work better than LLDB.