Re: [ANNOUNCEMENT] GDB 8.1 released!

[Joel Brobecker <brobecker at adacore dot com>]

> Thanks Joel for handling the release, as usual.

My pleasure :). It's really you guys who take care of getting the code
ready for release, so well done!

> 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.

Sounds like a good idea: We should indeed add those three languages.
Not sure about removing the others or not, but I would lean towards
removing them, just to keep the list short. Also, it keeps the focus
on the languages we know are still actively supported, and therefore
having a better chance of working well.

Another option is to remove the list entirely in the introduction
paragraph, and either leave it to the user to find this information
elsewhere or provide that information further down the document
(I can't really think of a good place though). Howzabout we put
that list on the GDB's main web page? Currently, it says:

| What is GDB?
| ------------
|
| GDB, the GNU Project debugger, allows you to see what is going on
| `inside' another program while it executes -- or what another program
| was doing at the moment it crashed.
|
| GDB can do four main kinds of things (plus other things in support of
| these) to help you catch bugs in the act:
|
|  * Start your program, specifying anything that might affect its behavior.
|  * Make your program stop on specified conditions.
|  * Examine what has happened, when your program has stopped.
|  * Change things in your program, so you can experiment with correcting
|    the effects of one bug and go on to learn about another.
|
| The program being debugged can be written in Ada, C, C++, Objective-C,
| Pascal (and many other languages). Those programs might be executing on
| the same machine as GDB (native) or on another machine (remote). GDB can
| run on most popular UNIX and Microsoft Windows variants.

We could even split the languages section off from the last paragraph
into its own section, vis:

| What is GDB?
| ------------
|
| GDB, the GNU Project debugger, allows you to see what is going on
| `inside' another program while it executes -- or what another program
| was doing at the moment it crashed.
|
| GDB can do four main kinds of things (plus other things in support of
| these) to help you catch bugs in the act:
|
|  * Start your program, specifying anything that might affect its behavior.
|  * Make your program stop on specified conditions.
|  * Examine what has happened, when your program has stopped.
|  * Change things in your program, so you can experiment with correcting
|    the effects of one bug and go on to learn about another.
|
| Those programs might be executing on the same machine as GDB (native)
| or on another machine (remote). GDB can run on most popular UNIX and
| Microsoft Windows variants.
|
| What Languages does GDB Support?
| --------------------------------
|
| GDB supports the following languages (in alphabetical order):
|  * Ada
|  * Assembly
|  * C
|  * C++
|  * D
|  * Fortran
|  * Go
|  * Objective-C
|  * OpenCL
|  * Modula-2
|  * Pascal
|  * Rust

As explained above, I fear that having this exhuastive list might
attract attention to regions of GDB that might have bitrotted a bit.

-- 
Joel