Patch to fix PR9861

TJ Laurenzo tlaurenzo@gmail.com
Mon Sep 26 17:33:00 GMT 2005


>  > I would expect similar behavior from GDB (except that in GDB, the
>  > lack of demangling would really complicate things more than the
>  > same lack in binutils).  So, my opinion is that GDB is the main
>  > problem here, since this patch effectively makes Java debugging
>  > very difficult with an unpatched GDB.
>
> It does.  However, it might be possible to persuade people to ship
> updated bnutils on free operating systems.  Unfree systems are going
> to be much more problematic, though.
I'm not sure we are talking about a hard requirement to update
binutils.  The old version works.  There are a few instances that
could cause confusion but which could be solved with a FAQ entry that
says to upgrade binutils to some version to get more specific error
messages (ie.  Unresolved symbols in the output from ld would not
pretty-print but would show raw mangled form).

As for GDB, I think it does become non-negotiable to upgrade that in
order to get anything but the most rudimentary debugging support.  I
have to ask, though, how many people who are using a bleeding-edge
version of gcj will be unwilling to update to a new version of GDB?  I
would think that it will be some years before non-free OS's (I am
specifically thinking of things like the "companion cd" for Solaris)
will include GCC 4.1 (or whichever version this patch makes its way
into) anyway.

>  > I will note that with my original patch, both tools would print
>  > demangled names but the return type would be listed as the first
>  > parameter.  In addition to being odd, this also has other problems
>  > that Ian pointed out.
>
> I don't think we can live with that!  :-)
That's why there is a "-a" version of the patch which doesn't do that!  :)

TJ



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