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

[John-Mark Gurney]

Warner Losh wrote this message on Tue, Apr 08, 2014 at 14:34 -0600:
> 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.

Does the gdb in ports support cross debugging?  Or at least easily?
I don't see anything in the Makefile that implies that it does...

Also, I noticed this:
ONLY_FOR_ARCHS= i386 amd64 powerpc powerpc64    # untested elsewhere, might work

That's missing a lot of archs...  Though it looks like 66 might have
better support...

-- 
  John-Mark Gurney				Voice: +1 415 225 5579

     "All that I will do, has been done, All that I have, has not."