Re: Status of GDB support for debugging of Fortran programs?

[Harald Anlauf <anlauf at gmx dot de>]

Hi Tobias,

many thanks for your detailed answer!

On 09/05/12 11:27, Tobias Burnus wrote:
> On 09/04/2012 09:16 PM, Harald Anlauf wrote:
> > does anybody know whether there has been any progress in GDB
> > that supports debugging of Fortran programs on Linux/x86?
>
> Yes, but only slowly: Support for modules is in GDB 7.2 (use: print
> 'mod1::myvar') as is support for UCS-4 strings (character(kind=4)).

Not exactly a major breakthrough...

> > Are there some secret patches that are needed to get it working?
>
> Yes - but they don't help with your problem.

:-(

> To a certain extend the problem seems to be that some big customers (of
> Red Hat, SUSE, etc.) don't put strong pressure/large financial incentive
> to their vendors to implement Fortran features. I think many bigger
> customers are using gfortran/gdb, but either they are happy with the
> current support or the issues don't escalate high enough in the
> hierarchy to reach the management.

It's sometimes hard to argue that also one has to spend some money for
good software support (not only for debugging, but also for profiling
and tracing) when it is thought that paying for hardware is sufficient.
That appears to be even true for HPC.

> To a certain extent that's also
> because several most sites also have commercial compilers.

True.  But many commercial products do not guarantee a better user
experience either... ;-)

> If you want to have a newer gdb (or GCC) on you openSUSE 12.1, you could
> use the builds from
> http://download.opensuse.org/repositories/devel:/gcc/openSUSE_12.1/
>
> You find gdb 7.4.50 of July there. That version should match 7.5
> (released 2012-08-17) minus a few later patches.

I tried that one, but it's only better in some respects that are irrelevant
to my issue.  (You knew that already).
Harald