Re: [vta->trunk] VTA merge

[David Edelsohn <dje dot gcc at gmail dot com>]

> > ? ?What I mean was for all platforms that might have older gdb's. When
> > VTA is merged will there be any legacy support for older gdb's or will
> > everyone have to upgrade gdb to debug code compiled in the gcc 4.5?
>
> I think it is reasonable for a given GCC version to declare a global
> minimum version of GDB for debugging GCC-compiled code with GDB - and a
> global minimum version of Binutils for compiling for systems using GNU
> Binutils - and that declaring such versions based on recent stable
> releases of those tools would be better than the present situation of a
> few, probably inaccurate, explicit statements about versions for given
> targets and likely many undocumented requirements. ?It seems likely that
> GDB 7.0 will be out well before GCC 4.5 and could be a suitable GDB
> version to specify.
>
> It is for those who care about a particular system to ensure that FSF GDB
> support for it works in current versions of FSF GDB rather than just in
> vendor patched versions of some old version. ?There are systems with GDB
> support in vendor patched versions but not FSF GDB, but Darwin (at least
> for IA32) is not one of them since AdaCore has added the required support
> to FSF GDB.

Does this mean that older versions of GDB will not work with the new debugging
information?  I do not expect older versions of GDB to use the additional
information, but I expected that they at least would ignore it and
work as before.

What is the effect of VTA on non-Dwarf debugging targets, such as AIX, which
uses stabs-like debugging.  Again, I do not expect the additional information
to be recorded in stabs, but I do expect stabs debugging to continue to work.

Thanks, David