Re: GDB & FreeBSD

[Mark Kettenis <kettenis at wins dot uva dot nl>]

   Date: Tue, 23 May 2000 12:26:20 +1000
   From: Andrew Cagney <ac131313@cygnus.com>

   Mark Kettenis wrote:
   > 
   > Hi All,
   > 
   > I spent some time on reviving GDB on FreeBSD.  Not too difficult since
   > it turns out that I can re-use a lot of code from the NetBSD port
   > (thanks J.T. :-)).
   > 
   > However, in doing so, I've probably killed support for older FreeBSD
   > systems (I suspect that the same happened with NetBSD).  From looking
   > at the FreeBSD CVS tree, FreeBSD 2.2 (which was released in March
   > 1997) and up should be fine (I did my work on FreeBSD 3.4).  On older
   > systems GDB will not compile.
   > 
   > Is this acceptable?

   By ``killed'' support did you completly delete it or just do changes
   that require obvious tweeks?  Having it working on 2.x, 3.x and 4.x with
   bit rot on 1.x is better than only working on 1.x/2.x.

I didn't completely delete things, but I'm not sure if I would call
the necessary tweeks "obvious".  However, I realise now that I should
be able to cook something up that should work on all i386 BSD's with
some additional configury, and that I can do some basic testing for it
on FreeBSD 3.4.

   I'd check it in along with a TODO entry mentioning the need to access
   how hard it is to ``fix'' 1.x.  

OK, I'll do that for the code that I have right now (which should work
on FreeBSD 2.2 and up) and then see if I can revive the support for
older FreeBSD's after that.

Mark