From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 Return-Path: Received: (qmail 6567 invoked by alias); 5 May 2004 00:28:25 -0000 Mailing-List: contact gdb-help@sources.redhat.com; run by ezmlm Precedence: bulk List-Subscribe: List-Archive: List-Post: List-Help: , Sender: gdb-owner@sources.redhat.com Received: (qmail 6560 invoked from network); 5 May 2004 00:28:24 -0000 Received: from unknown (HELO mail-out4.apple.com) (17.254.13.23) by sources.redhat.com with SMTP; 5 May 2004 00:28:24 -0000 Received: from mailgate1.apple.com (a17-128-100-225.apple.com [17.128.100.225]) by mail-out4.apple.com (8.12.11/8.12.11) with ESMTP id i450SfaG018799 for ; Tue, 4 May 2004 17:28:41 -0700 (PDT) Received: from relay2.apple.com (relay2.apple.com) by mailgate1.apple.com (Content Technologies SMTPRS 4.3.6) with ESMTP id ; Tue, 4 May 2004 17:28:24 -0700 Received: from apple.com ([17.219.199.8]) by relay2.apple.com (8.12.11/8.12.11) with ESMTP id i450SK22021622; Tue, 4 May 2004 17:28:21 -0700 (PDT) Message-ID: <40983533.9030603@apple.com> Date: Wed, 05 May 2004 00:28:00 -0000 From: Stan Shebs User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; U; PPC Mac OS X Mach-O; en-US; rv:1.6) Gecko/20040113 MIME-Version: 1.0 To: Kean Johnston CC: "Nathan J. Williams" , Andrew Cagney , Michael Elizabeth Chastain , ezannoni@redhat.com, gdb@sources.redhat.com, jimb@redhat.com Subject: Re: Phasing out Dwarf 1? References: <20040503155621.CF3194B104@berman.michael-chastain.com> <4097B8C6.10805@gnu.org> <4097CE64.4040101@sco.com> In-Reply-To: <4097CE64.4040101@sco.com> Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii; format=flowed Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit X-SW-Source: 2004-05/txt/msg00029.txt.bz2 Kean Johnston wrote: >> This seems like a poor argument. The availibility and suitability of >> modern GCC for building GDB does not imply that modern GCC will be >> suitable for building the application to be debugged. > > > I agree. I think phasing out a whole debugging format > is ill-advised. Most people dont want to keep around > multiple versions of a tool. If I need to debug an > old binary becuase the libc I replaced today is breaking > something, I think I have a reasonable expectation of > being able to do so. I think it is quite appropriate to > phase out the *generation* of said format, but not its > interpretation in a debugger. > > Kean > But how is it going to get tested? Experience shows that untested parts of GDB bitrot pretty quickly, and without any volunteers to let us know when things break and/or fix them when they do, the claim of support is just misleading to users. There are many previous releases of GDB that do include Dwarf 1 support, and they build/run fine on a wide variety of hosts, so it's not like Dwarf 1 users are being left debugger-less. Now if you're going to volunteer to set up a Dwarf 1 testing regimen with an old GCC and current GDB, and report on it regularly, I think that could justify keeping it. But miss a week, and poof! :-) Stan