Time for turning off gdb by default? Or worse...

[Warner Losh]

Greetings,

The gdb in the tree seems to be of very limited usefulness these days. It doesn’t seem to work on clang-enabled architectures w/o building -gdwarf-2, it doesn’t seem to work with threaded applications, and on some architectures it doesn’t seem to work at all (mips comes to mind, but it may have been the two binaries I tried).

It seems like we’d be doing our users a favor by applying:

diff -r 8bfca9de870e share/mk/bsd.own.mk
--- a/share/mk/bsd.own.mk
+++ b/share/mk/bsd.own.mk
@@ -266,7 +266,6 @@ WITH_HESIOD=
     FREEBSD_UPDATE \
     GAMES \
     GCOV \
-    GDB \
     GNU \
     GNU_GREP_COMPAT \
     GPIB \
@@ -355,6 +354,7 @@ WITH_HESIOD=
     CLANG_EXTRAS \
     CTF \
     DEBUG_FILES \
+    GDB \
     HESIOD \
     INSTALL_AS_USER \
     LLDB \

to the tree, which will turn gdb off by default. It may make more sense to just remove it entirely, but I’m not sure I want to go there just yet in case there are things that I’m missing. I believe that the port will be adequate for all architectures we support, but haven’t tested this directly yet. I do know that on amd64, the port just worked, where the in-tree gdb was an epic fail.

Comments?

Warner