Re: Proposal: obsolete target hppa*-hp-hpux10.*

["John David Anglin" <dave at hiauly1 dot hia dot nrc dot ca>]

>   . There is at least one user (Dave A), which means that there are
>     probably more users.
> 
> Philosophically, I see the issue as priorities.  It takes work to
> maintain and QA gdb on hpux 10.20.  It takes work even if gdb on hpux
> 11.11 is already working.  I would rather spend my attention somewhere
> else, and so would everybody else in the world, judging by the level of
> activity.

I'm willing to see if I can resolve the build problems under HP-UX 10.20.

As far as the code generated by GCC and the debug information, there is
almost no difference between HP-UX 10 and 11.  We have weak symbol support
and and a different way of running initializer, but that's it.  I don't
particularly care about HP compiler support.  There's still a fair number
of PA 1.1 workstations running.  They were really the peak in PA-RISC
technology and they have proved to be extremely reliable.  On the other
hand, I agree that there isn't much point in spending a lot of effort
on the machines.

The 10.20 machine that I use for GCC testing is mainly used for support
of a space experiment that probably will be supported by NASA and ESA
through to the end of 2007.  I'm not particularly interested in moving
the software and licenses to a newer machine.  So, I will probably try
to keep the machine operational until the end of the mission.  Anyway,
I probably will support 10.20 in GCC until 3.5 is released.

I think if Michael can improve gdb under HP-UX 11, we would also see
benefits under HP-UX 10.

Carlos O'Donell has made a New Years resolution to spend a good
portion of his time on gdb for hppa-linux.  He has done an excellent
job in improving glibc.  Matthew Wilcox has offered a bounty for a
gdb maintainer for hppa-linux:

<http://lists.parisc-linux.org/pipermail/parisc-linux/2004-January/022061.html>.

I managed to build gdb 6.0 under hppa-linux starting from the debian
patches.  It only took a couple of small patches.  My initial impression
is that it works better than 5.3, particularly with ada code.  I did
have a problem with an undefined dwarf2 DIE.

In summary, I'm hopeful that the gdb support for PA-RISC can be improved
in 2004.

Dave
-- 
J. David Anglin                                  dave.anglin@nrc-cnrc.gc.ca
National Research Council of Canada              (613) 990-0752 (FAX: 952-6602)