Re: Preparing for the GDB 5.0 / GDB 2000 / GDB2k release

[Jim Kingdon <kingdon at redhat dot com>]

> * Support for unloading of shared libraries.  The current code-base
>   doesn't really support this.  HJ Lu forwarded some patches that hack
>   around this, but I don't think they are acceptable.  They introduce
>   two more (uneccessary) hooks.  Personally I don't fixing this for
>   GDB 5.0 terribly important.  There isn't that many code out there, that
>   explicitly unloads shared libs.

As far as I know there is more out there than you might realize.  A
modern application like mozilla uses dlopen() a lot (feel free to
flame about whether this tendency is a fad or really useful but that
isn't the point).  For example see
http://bugzilla.redhat.com/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=5130

I'm hoping to find time to look at this.  Whether or not it is me, I
hope that we can get some victims ^W contributors working on finding a
solution rather than merely talking about what was wrong with the
patch which was sent to this list.

But I wouldn't ask that this hold up GDB 2000.  It could be a somewhat
involved process to get a good solution.  IMHO, a release is the time
to stabilize what is already there, rather than to start hacking away
to add new stuff.

> I think having an "x86 linux native" port with working threads support
> in GDB 5.0 is very important.

Have you tried GDB from CVS in the last 6 months or so?  I'm not aware
of any known bugs and Red Hat Linux has been shipping with the code
which is in CVS for a while (I can offer details if needed).

> Another problem is that the official maintainer of "x86 linux
> native" seems to be very busy lately.  I don't blame Jim [Blandy]
> for "having a life"

Well, I'm likely to get/stay involved since I just told the Red Hat
Linux people that I'd continue to build the packages for GDB.  If you
think maintainer bandwidth is what is holding up things like the long
double one, feel free to see if there is anything I can do to help
(although I'm not official the way JimB is, at least not yet).