Re: ia64 linux doesn't bootstrap

[Jim Wilson <wilson@redhat.com>]

>I was unaware of the sourceforge gdbf95 project, which provides a more 
>functional gdb than I had seen before.

I don't know about gdb Fortran support.  Perhaps you are seeing problems
which are Fortran specific rather than IA-64 specific.

> I've tried to build gdb-5.2.1 with 
>gcc-3.3, and it failed with many complaints about illegal code. 

You will have to be more specific.  I just tried building gdb-5.2.1 with
a 021014 gcc snapshot, and I didn't have any problems building it.  I did
have a problem building dejagnu-gdb-5.2.1, but that was a binutils/gcc
mismatch.  ld tries to pretty-print a "mktemp is dangerous" warning by reading
the debug info, and gets confused because it doesn't have DW_FORM_strp support.
That is fixed by using a newer binutils.  I don't feel like going to that
much trouble at the moment though.

It would also be possible to get a similar gcc/gdb mismatch, since older gdbs
won't have DW_FORM_strp support, and current gcc is likely to emit them.

> It did 
>succeed with a buggy pre-3.0 gcc; there were I think 254 unexpected errors in 
>testsuite.  Maybe that's acceptable?

No, that isn't an acceptable number of gdb failures, but you might have to
live with it for now if you aren't interested in trying to fix gdb problems
yourself.

Jim