[RFC] Deprecate stabs

[John Baldwin]

On 8/30/23 10:48 AM, Tom Tromey wrote:
>>> I think it's time to deprecate stabs, and plan to remove all support
>>> for them.  Stabs are long since obsolete and are not really maintained
>>> in gdb.  GCC deprecated them in 12 and will remove them as well.
> 
> Pedro> Meanwhile, half a year passed, and GCC 13 is out.
> 
> Pedro> My position with stabs for years had been that, as long as GCC needs it for some ports,
> Pedro> we should keep it.  Since GCC has since removed support for stabs, I think we're now
> Pedro> free to remove it too.
> 
> Pedro> I think we should mark stabs deprecated for GDB 14.  We can discuss more when to actually
> Pedro> remove it, but IMO, the sooner we mark it deprecated, the sooner people will be aware of our
> Pedro> intentions.  FWIW, I do support removing it in GDB 15.
> 
> It's maybe a little late for 14/15 now.
> 
> I'm thinking I will send email to gdb@ and push the NEWS patch after the
> 14 branch is made.  That is, deprecate in 15 and remove in 16.
> 
> I have also been wondering if some of the other debug formats are still
> relevant.  My suspicion is that they are long since obsolete.

We still haven't branched for 14, so presumably you can still mark it
deprecated in 14?  Users don't really run master I assume, so adding
it to NEWS earlier in 14.x's cycle wouldn't have made a difference I
think?  You can always defer the actual removal of stabs to later
(closer to 15 branching) to leave time for users to voice their input.

-- 
John Baldwin