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Re: Phasing out Dwarf 1?


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


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