commitment to DWARF2 debugging information

[Stan Shebs]

David O'Brien wrote:
> 
> Hello all,
> 
> At the urging of one of the GDB maintainers I am seriously considering
> switching from STABS to the DWARF2 debugging format for all its
> platforms.  This includes i386, Alpha, Sparc64, PPC, StrongARM, and
> IA-64.
> 
> My question is how committed is the GCC Project on maintaining DWARF2 and
> to continue its development where needed.

I would suggest keeping an eye on the Dwarf2 standard update that is
currently going on; the goal is to produce a real standard this time
(the document that everybody calls a standard is actually a first draft).
Unfortunately, I don't have the references handy, but there are other
people on this list who know about it and who can comment as well.

The thing to watch out for, of course, is backward compatibility.
Certainly the current committee members have an interest in that,
but the since the old draft is ill-defined in places, there is
room for hosure, especially on less-popular configurations where
it might be that nobody is concerned about the effect of specific
proposals for changes to Dwarf2.

Stan