Re: [PATCH] Remove support for "rtld_" prefix on solib-svr4 probes

[Pedro Alves <palves@redhat.com>]

On 09/25/2014 10:53 PM, Sergio Durigan Junior wrote:

>> I tend to view supporting older-ish distros that people might
>> still be using like the proprietary OSs we "support" (in a sense).
>> I think that just as we'd accept a patch that makes GDB work better
>> on Windows 7 OOTB (e.g., to work around some debug API issue), even
>> though there's already Windows 8 out there, I think patches that make
>> GDB work better OOTB on a bit older (but still in use) distros are
>> fine, as long as they don't get in the way of progress and don't
>> impose a big maintenance burden.
> 
> Heh, in my personal opinion GDB should not support proprietary OSes
> OOTB.  But I certainly don't want to start a flamewar.

I don't either.  But I'd rather a user stuck on such a OS be able to
use a free debugger, than drive him towards a proprietary debugger.
That's part of how I got involved into GDB in the first place.  I was
forced to used Windows at work.  I worked around that by using Cygwin,
to be able to use the free tools I preferred.  At the same time
I needed to build a tool that would run on Windows CE.  So I worked on
the GNU toolchain in order to target that OS.  Then I wanted to make Cygwin
GDB better too, because it was similar to CE, and I was using it
at work too.  And then somehow I ended up working on GDB full
time.  :-P  It's a trap, I tells ya!

The real point was that the user building GDB may have no control
over the system bits of the distro it is building GDB for (in this
case glibc's loader), just like when building for a proprietary OS,
even though GNU/Linux distros are based (mostly) on free sources.

Thanks,
Pedro Alves