Proposal to obsolete i[3456]86-*-dgux*

[Michael Elizabeth Chastain <mec at shout dot net>]

This is a proposal to remove support for DG/UX in gdb.  The DG/UX
support code would be marked 'obsolete' in the next release of gdb and
removed entirely two releases from now.

If you use or support gdb on DG/UX, please respond to this message.
The presence of active users will terminate the obsolescence procedure.
I am particularly interested in your DG/UX version, your compiler
vendor and compiler version, and your gdb version.

gdb supports DG/UX as a native configuration with configuration
triples that match 'i[3456]86-*-dgux*'.  gdb does not support DG/UX
as a cross target.

I want to obsolete DG/UX because it's one of the last platforms that use
DWARF-1.  DWARF-1 is nearing the end of its useful life; among other
things, it will never support C++.

DG/UX is a product of Data General.  Data General was acquired by EMC
in 1999-09 and is now a division of EMC.  The last release of DG/UX
was DG/UX 4.20MU07, released 2001-04.

DG/UX uses gcc as its bundled C compiler.  They have their own linker
and their own debuggers ('mxdb' and 'dbx').  I came across an old
mailing list message, circa 1999, which said that DG/UX is stuck on
DWARF-1 because their linker does not support DWARF-2.  This information
is rumor quality but it is plausible.

gcc obsoleted i[3456]86-dg-dgux in gcc 3.1 and has deleted the code
in gcc-3_3-branch.

Ordinarily I would think that DG/UX would still have too many users in
the field, since the last release was only 22 months ago.  But nobody
stepped forward to say they were using gcc on DG/UX, so gcc successfully
obsoleted it.

Again, if you use or support gdb on DG/UX, please let us know about it.

Michael Elizabeth Chastain
<mec@shout.net>
"love without fear"