[ANNOUNCEMENT] GDB 8.1 released!

[ANNOUNCEMENT] GDB 8.1 released!

[Joel Brobecker]

            GDB 8.1 released!

Release 8.1 of GDB, the GNU Debugger, is now available via anonymous
FTP.  GDB is a source-level debugger for Ada, C, C++, Objective-C,
Pascal and many other languages.  GDB can target (i.e., debug programs
running on) more than a dozen different processor architectures, and GDB
itself can run on most popular GNU/Linux, Unix and Microsoft Windows
variants.

You can download GDB from the GNU FTP server in the directory:

        ftp://ftp.gnu.org/gnu/gdb

The vital stats:

  Size   md5sum                            Name
  20MiB  f46487561f9a16916a8102316f7fd105  gdb-8.1.tar.xz
  36MiB  0c85ecbb43569ec43b1c9230622e84ab  gdb-8.1.tar.gz

There is a web page for GDB at:

        http://www.gnu.org/software/gdb/

That page includes information about GDB mailing lists (an announcement
mailing list, developers discussion lists, etc.), details on how to
access GDB's source repository, locations for development snapshots,
preformatted documentation, and links to related information around
the net.  We will put errata notes and host-specific tips for this release
on-line as any problems come up.  All mailing lists archives are also
browsable via the web.

GDB 8.1 includes the following changes and enhancements:

  * Breakpoints on C++ functions are now set on all scopes by default
    ("wild" matching);

  * Support for inserting breakpoints on functions marked with C++ ABI tags;

  * Target floating-point arithmetic emulation during expression evaluation
    (requires MPFR 3.1 or later);

  * Various Python Scripting enhancements;

  * Improved Rust support; in particular, Trait objects can now be inspected
    when debugging Rust code;

  * GDB no longer makes assumptions about the type of symbols without
    debugging information to avoid producing erroneous and often confusing
    results;

  * The 'enable' and 'disable' commands now accept a range of breakpoint
    locations;

  * New 'starti' command to start the program at the first instruction;

  * New 'rbreak' command to insert a number of breakpoints via a regular
    expression pattern (requires Python);

  * The 'ptype' command now supports printing the offset and size of
    the fields in a struct;

  * The 'gcore' command now supports dumping all the memory mappings
    ('-a' command-line option);

  * New shortcuts for TUI Single-Key mode: 'i' for stepi, and 'o' for nexti;

  * GDBserver enhancements:
    ** Support for transmitting environment variables to GDBserver;
    ** Support for starting inferior processes with a specified initial
       working directory;
    ** On Unix systems, support for globbing expansion and variable
       substitution of inferior command-line arguments;

  * Various completion enhancements;

  * The command used to compile and inject code with the 'compile' command
    is now configurable;

  * New '--readnever' command-line option to speed the GDB startup when
    debugging information is not needed;

  * Support for the following new native configurations:
    ** FreeBSD/aarch64 (aarch64*-*-freebsd*);
    ** FreeBSD/arm (arm*-*-freebsd*);

  * Support for the following new targets:
    ** FreeBSD/aarch64 (aarch64*-*-freebsd*);
    ** FreeBSD/arm (arm*-*-freebsd*);
    ** OpenRISC ELF (or1k*-*-elf)

  * Removed support for the following targets and native configurations:
    ** Solaris2/x86 (i?86-*-solaris2.[0-9]);
    ** Solaris2/sparc (sparc*-*-solaris2.[0-9]);

For a complete list and more details on each item, please see the gdb/NEWS
file, available at:
https://sourceware.org/git/gitweb.cgi?p=binutils-gdb.git;a=blob_plain;f=gdb/NEWS;hb=gdb-8.1-release

-- 
Joel Brobecker

Re: [ANNOUNCEMENT] GDB 8.1 released!

[Frank Ch. Eigler]

Joel Brobecker <brobecker@adacore.com> writes:

>             GDB 8.1 released!

Congrats.

> Release 8.1 of GDB, the GNU Debugger, is now available via anonymous
> FTP.  [...]

The old school curmudgeon in me loves it that anonymous FTP is mentioned
in first sentence.  Is that part really so relevant in the $CURRENT_YEAR?

- FChE

Re: [ANNOUNCEMENT] GDB 8.1 released!

[Joel Brobecker]

> > Release 8.1 of GDB, the GNU Debugger, is now available via anonymous
> > FTP.  [...]
> 
> The old school curmudgeon in me loves it that anonymous FTP is mentioned
> in first sentence.  Is that part really so relevant in the $CURRENT_YEAR?

I don't mind removing it. RMS made a request about the text as well,
so I sent him the new version for his review. If he approves it,
the reference will be gone from this paragraph :).

-- 
Joel

Re: [ANNOUNCEMENT] GDB 8.1 released!

[Simon Marchi]

Thanks for taking care of the release!

Just one precision:

>   * New 'rbreak' command to insert a number of breakpoints via a 
> regular
>     expression pattern (requires Python);

If I'm not mistaken, the rbreak CLI command was available before.  
What's new is the new rbreak function in the Python API.  The existing 
rbreak CLI command does not require Python.

Simon

Re: [ANNOUNCEMENT] GDB 8.1 released!

[Dennis Clarke]

On 31/01/18 02:45 PM, Simon Marchi wrote:
> Thanks for taking care of the release!
> 
> Just one precision:
> 
>>   * New 'rbreak' command to insert a number of breakpoints via a regular
>>     expression pattern (requires Python);

Just a question to clarify here but do I now need big ol' python to
  build gdb from source?

Dennis

Re: [ANNOUNCEMENT] GDB 8.1 released!

[Joel Brobecker]

> > Just one precision:

Thanks, Simon!

> > >   * New 'rbreak' command to insert a number of breakpoints via a regular
> > >     expression pattern (requires Python);
> 
> Just a question to clarify here but do I now need big ol' python to
>  build gdb from source?

Python is still optional.

-- 
Joel

Re: [ANNOUNCEMENT] GDB 8.1 released!

[Dennis Clarke]

On 01/02/18 04:47 AM, Joel Brobecker wrote:
>>> Just one precision:
> 
> Thanks, Simon!
> 
>>>>    * New 'rbreak' command to insert a number of breakpoints via a regular
>>>>      expression pattern (requires Python);
>>
>> Just a question to clarify here but do I now need big ol' python to
>>   build gdb from source?
> 
> Python is still optional.
> 

thank you for that !  I think building python from source is a 
nightmare. Same with PHP7.x these days.

dc

Re: [ANNOUNCEMENT] GDB 8.1 released!

[Paul Smith]

On Thu, 2018-02-01 at 15:41 -0500, Dennis Clarke wrote:
> thank you for that !  I think building python from source is a 
> nightmare. Same with PHP7.x these days.

I don't know about Python 3 since I've never tried it, but it's very
simple to build Python 2.7 from source.  I do it on both GNU/Linux and
MacOS with very little trouble.

Re: [ANNOUNCEMENT] GDB 8.1 released!

[Dennis Clarke]

On 01/02/18 04:03 PM, Paul Smith wrote:
> On Thu, 2018-02-01 at 15:41 -0500, Dennis Clarke wrote:
>> thank you for that !  I think building python from source is a
>> nightmare. Same with PHP7.x these days.
> 
> I don't know about Python 3 since I've never tried it, but it's very
> simple to build Python 2.7 from source.  I do it on both GNU/Linux and
> MacOS with very little trouble.
> 

Hrmm ... I'll give that a whirl and see what happens.
Thank you for the tip.

dc

Re: [ANNOUNCEMENT] GDB 8.1 released!

[Joel Brobecker]

> thank you for that !  I think building python from source is a
> nightmare.  Same with PHP7.x these days.

You don't need to build Python from source in order to build GDB
with Python support. I've built GDB with the Python installed on
on my system without problems before (I don't remember if you need
any "dev" package for that, but it would be similar to when you use
the system ncurses vs your own).

-- 
Joel

Re: [ANNOUNCEMENT] GDB 8.1 released!

[Pedro Alves]

Hi all,

Congrats everyone!  This is a really great release.
I'm excited by a lot of things in here.  Lots of usability
improvements, optimizations and new features, etc.  There's
something for everybody.

And I'm also excited by the things already starting to cook
up for the next release too!

Thanks Joel for handling the release, as usual.

On 01/31/2018 04:30 AM, Joel Brobecker wrote:

> Release 8.1 of GDB, the GNU Debugger, is now available via anonymous
> FTP.  GDB is a source-level debugger for Ada, C, C++, Objective-C,
> Pascal and many other languages.  GDB can target (i.e., debug programs
> running on) more than a dozen different processor architectures, and GDB
> itself can run on most popular GNU/Linux, Unix and Microsoft Windows
> variants.

While we're on to spring cleaning the announcements, Pascal and Objective-C
support hasn't really seen much (any?) development in a while, and I'm
not really sure they're really that much used.  I'd consider mentioning
instead (or in addition) other more active languages, like Rust, maybe
Fortran and Go, for example.

Thanks,
Pedro Alves