Experiences building and using gdb 6.8 on Solaris

[Frank Middleton <f dot middleton at apogeect dot com>]

Not sure if this is the correct list, but maybe someone here is interested
in some Solaris issues

This is on snv103 (SunOS 5.11) for SPARC, with make aliased to gmake.

Biggest problem is that make distclean doesn't remove any of the cache
files, so the make fails miserably if, for example, you change LDFLAGS.

In order to get it to build, it was necessary to get the latest ncurses,
and to build that --with-shared, and, as usual, remember not to use
Solaris /bin/sh.

The motivation to build the latest gdb is the following error with
GNU gdb 6.3.50_2004-11-23-cvs
...
elfread.c:366: internal-error: sect_index_data not initialized
...

but, alas, it still fails with GNU gdb 6.8
...
elfread.c:424: internal-error: sect_index_data not initialized
A problem internal to GDB has been detected,
further debugging may prove unreliable.

Aside from the optimism of the last line (further debugging appears
to be impossible), is this a known problem? It is proving to be rather
difficult to make a simple test case, and extensive Googling found
little other than that something similar had been fixed a while ago.

Gdb runs simple executables just fine. The problem comes when linking
and running an executable containing a mix of libraries compiled using
Sun cc (i.e. the system libraries), some 3rd party libraries, probably
compiled using a relatively old gcc (3.4.2), and a relatively new
gcc (4.3.2) locally. Truss shows that the last library to be opened
was /usr/lib/libXau.so.6. Both versions of gdb emit this warning:
warning: Lowest section in /usr/lib/libdl.so.1 is .SUNW_syminfo at 00000094
AFAIK Sun ld was used for linking throughout. The application actually
run properly if you run it without gdb.

Any insights much appreciated...