Re: Status of Ada support in GDB?

[Andreas Jaeger <aj at suse dot de>]

Hi Joel,
 
Joel Brobecker <brobecker at gnat dot com> writes:

> Andreas,
>
>> Trying to debug some Ada problems in GCC I noticed that GDB comes with
>> Ada support files but does not link them at all, they just seem to be
>> there for cosmetic :-(
>
> Let me explain a bit the history behind these files, and why they are
> not linked in yet. 

Thanks for the background.

> We, at ACT, are the original authors of these files, and have been
> planning on submitting them for inclusion in the FSF tree as soon as
> possible. There is no doubt in our minds that this would be beneficial
> to everybody: the GDB community, the free software community, the Ada
> community, and also ACT itself. So we are trying very hard on our side
> to get this done. Unfortunately, due to commercial pressure and lack of
> resources, we haven't be able to get this done yet.
>
> So maybe a year ago, ACT made a "code dropping": our sources-du-jour
> were made available for download on the sources.redhat.com ftp site.
> The hope was that some people might find it useful, while we keep making
> progress on cleaning up our code to get it to a state where it would be
> acceptable for inclusion.
>
> Somebody outside of ACT actually volunteered to merge these changes into
> the FSF tree for us. He started by first sending a new patch that was
> this time against the current sources (instead of current against an old
> 5.1 snapshot). He then checked in the ada-* files, and started cleaning
> them up. The plan was for him to (more or less): cleanup these files,
> add the bits in the makefiles to compile them in, and then activate
> slowly all the ada functionality. Unfortunately, as it often happens,
> this volunteer found a day job, and found that he could not spend time
> on this task anymore.
>
> So ACT is picking up the task again. We are getting much closer to
> having something we can submit, one of our part-time consultant is
> working full-time (if I may say so) on it. In the meantime, could you

I'm glad to hear about this commitment!

> try using the 5.1.1-based sources that we made available through
> sources.redhat.com?

I need a gdb to debug problems on x86-64 - and that architecture is
only supported since gdb 5.2, so your 5.1.1 changes will not help me
directly,

Andreas
-- 
 Andreas Jaeger
  SuSE Labs aj at suse dot de
   private aj at arthur dot inka dot de
    http://www.suse.de/~aj