Proposal to Removal of QNX Neutrino support from GDB

Simon Marchi via Gdb
2020-12-11T14:47:13Z

Hi,

Given that:

- there hasn't been contributions to the QNX Neutrino port for a while [1]
- there is no maintainer for it
- the tools to build and run QNX programs are not publicly available for
anybody to test this support

I propose to remove QNX Neutrino support from GDB for GDB 12. That means
the support would still be included in GDB 11, the next release, and removed
just after the GDB 11 branch is created.

There are two parts to it:

1. Native bits for when GDB itself runs on Neutrino (nto-procfs.c)
2. Neutrino target support (nto-tdep.c and friends)

We can't compile #1, as that requires the Neutrino SDK. We can build-test
#2, as it doesn't require Neutrino-specific include files, but we can't run
it. The current plan is to remove both. But if Neutrino target support
(#2) is still being used (say, with a custom remote target), but native
support (#1) isn't, one option is to only remove the native bits, so we only
keep the part that anybody can at least build.

If somebody would like the support for Neutrino to stay in GDB, please speak up.
If so, we will need a maintainer to step up and become responsible to that port.

There is a patch series that implement the proposal here:

https://sourceware.org/pipermail/gdb-patches/2020-December/173894.html

Thanks,

Simon

[1] Last one was d7161de46af ("[nto] Improve ABI sniffing.")