Preparing for the GDB 5.0 / GDB 2000 / GDB2k release

[Patrick J. LoPresti]

Andrew Cagney <ac131313@cygnus.com> writes:

> With that said, I would consider a one month gap between 5.0 and 5.1 to
> be unrealistic. I'd also consider it un-reasonable to mandate the
> acceptance of patches just because a reasonable solution isn't
> available.

I think it depends on the situation.  At this point, stock GDB has
been broken on Linux/x86 for several *years*.

The problem with debugging across dlopen()/dlclose()/dlopen() sounds
complicated.  It is also fairly obscure.  However, being unable to use
breakpoints in *any shared library at all* is not obscure.  It makes
stock GDB extremely painful for a lot of uses.  If GDB 5.0 is released
with the same problem, I suspect the word among Linux developers will
be the same as it has been for the last few years: "Stock GDB is
broken; don't use it."

The SamL/H.J. patches fix the problem, as far as we can tell here.
And those patches are not very large.  Is it really so hard to put
them in and fix the problem the Right Way later?  The argument "we
can't accept every hack" is pretty weak.  You are not being asked to
accept every hack, you are being asked to accept a single hack which
addresses a very serious problem on a major platform.

Just $0.02 from a developer who is tired of manually patching
prereleases...

 - Pat