Re: Variable "foo" is not available

[Daniel Jacobowitz <drow@false.org>]

On Fri, Apr 01, 2005 at 06:39:45PM +0200, Reiner Steib wrote:
> Hi,
> 
> while running Emacs under gdb, I got the backtrace shown below with
> many messages like `vector=Variable "vector" is not available'.
> Eli Zaretskii suggested[1] to ask here what this means.
> 
> The gdb version is 6.2.1 (from SuSE Linux 9.2 AMD 64).  The gdb
> session is still running, so I can provide more information if
> requested.

It means, literally, that the value is not available.  The compiler has
not saved it in somewhere that is still accessible, or has not told GDB
properly where it was saved.

(There's always a chance that it's a GDB bug, of course.  But that's
what the message is intended to mean.)

If you use a March CVS snapshot of GDB, the output will be a little
nicer, and following function arguments won't be chopped off.

> #61 0x000000000054c960 in internal_catch (tag=Variable "tag" is not available.
> )
>     at [...]/emacs/src/eval.c:1144

What this normally means is that you are using optimization, and the value
of tag is not referenced after the function call, so the compiler did
not save it anywhere.

-- 
Daniel Jacobowitz
CodeSourcery, LLC