using GDB 5 on Solaris 7 with Sun WS5.0

[Tanvir Hassan <tanvir dot hassan at tumisoftware dot com>]

Hi All!

I am using some 3rd party tools that have basically forced me to run
SunWorkshop 5.0 on Solaris 7.  When I try to use dbx to debug my app (~45Mb
with -g) it crashes.  I have applied all patches to dbx and it still
crashes.  So I have given up on it for now.

Using GDB has exposed several issues:

1) they say I need to use "-g -xs" which when I use on all .o's in my app
will make an 800Mb exe and is too ponderous to debug.  I have heard that
someone might have changed GDB to do "lazy" loading of symbols by reading
them from the *.o instead of the exe and thus obviating the need for "-xs",
but I don't see any mention of this in any of the source.  If anyone knows
about that Solaris fix, please let me know!

2) the name mangling/vtable scheme of Sun WS5.0 is apparently using the
ISO/ANSI ABI standard and GDB cannot deal with it (it needs an new BFD to
handle this?  or is there a generic name de-mangling place in the code?), so
now at least it is not crashing, but I cannot view any symbols.  I tried to
use the Sun compiler in -compat mode (and GDB DOES understand those mangled
names), but then I cannot use STL (which is TOTALLY unacceptable).

Is there a version of GDB out there that will work with the output of Sun
WS5.0 CC (the C++ compiler and linker) on Solaris 7?  Because the rest of my
software is only certified (and thus only supported) on Solaris 7 with Sun
WS5.0 I am stuck using that toolchain and cannot move to GCC (for now).

Thanks!