Re: [RFC] Deprecate stabs

[Pedro Alves <pedro@palves.net>]

Hi!

This subject came up on IRC today.

On 2023-01-19 17:41, Tom Tromey wrote:
> I think it's time to deprecate stabs, and plan to remove all support
> for them.  Stabs are long since obsolete and are not really maintained
> in gdb.  GCC deprecated them in 12 and will remove them as well.


Meanwhile, half a year passed, and GCC 13 is out.

My position with stabs for years had been that, as long as GCC needs it for some ports,
we should keep it.  Since GCC has since removed support for stabs, I think we're now
free to remove it too.

I think we should mark stabs deprecated for GDB 14.  We can discuss more when to actually
remove it, but IMO, the sooner we mark it deprecated, the sooner people will be aware of our
intentions.  FWIW, I do support removing it in GDB 15.

Pedro Alves

> ---
>  gdb/NEWS | 3 +++
>  1 file changed, 3 insertions(+)
> 
> diff --git a/gdb/NEWS b/gdb/NEWS
> index c0aac212e30..317f6536bc0 100644
> --- a/gdb/NEWS
> +++ b/gdb/NEWS
> @@ -5,6 +5,9 @@
>  
>  * MI version 1 has been removed.
>  
> +* Support for the stabs debugging format is deprecated, and it will be
> +  removed in GDB 15.
> +
>  * GDB has initial built-in support for the Debugger Adapter Protocol.
>    This support requires that GDB be built with Python scripting
>    enabled.