From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 Return-Path: Received: (qmail 24333 invoked by alias); 16 Apr 2003 20:29:57 -0000 Mailing-List: contact gdb-help@sources.redhat.com; run by ezmlm Precedence: bulk List-Subscribe: List-Archive: List-Post: List-Help: , Sender: gdb-owner@sources.redhat.com Received: (qmail 24322 invoked from network); 16 Apr 2003 20:29:57 -0000 Received: from unknown (HELO dberlin.org) (69.3.5.6) by sources.redhat.com with SMTP; 16 Apr 2003 20:29:57 -0000 Received: from [192.168.1.31] (account dberlin HELO dberlin.org) by dberlin.org (CommuniGate Pro SMTP 4.1b3) with ESMTP-TLS id 3560069; Wed, 16 Apr 2003 16:29:56 -0400 Date: Wed, 16 Apr 2003 20:29:00 -0000 Subject: Re: stabs and macro information Content-Type: text/plain; charset=US-ASCII; format=flowed Mime-Version: 1.0 (Apple Message framework v552) Cc: David Taylor , gcc@gcc.gnu.org, gdb@sources.redhat.com To: Daniel Jacobowitz From: Daniel Berlin In-Reply-To: <20030416172704.GB16947@nevyn.them.org> Message-Id: <2EE8F46C-704A-11D7-A180-000393575BCC@dberlin.org> Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit X-SW-Source: 2003-04/txt/msg00178.txt.bz2 On Wednesday, April 16, 2003, at 01:27 PM, Daniel Jacobowitz wrote: > On Wed, Apr 16, 2003 at 11:58:19AM -0400, David Taylor wrote: >> Currently, when invoked with -gdwarf-2 -g3, gcc will record macro >> information in a .debug_macinfo elf section. And when presented with >> an executable containing macro information in a .debug_macinfo >> section, gdb will make use of it. >> >> Many companies, including EMC, still use stabs. So... it would be >> nice if the same was true of stabs. > > A more interesting question, to me, is why EMC still needs to use > stabs. I didn't want to get into this argument, as there are companies that have valid reasons not to use DWARF2 given the current implementations, particularly those compaonies that end up with 1 gigabyte with stabs info, and 5 gigabytes with dwarf2 info, or something like that. However, I was going to ask whether the cost of *adding* more features to the STABS implementations in gdb and gcc is worth the future maintenance cost at this point in the life of STABS. > They are an inferior debug format, extremely hard to parse or > extend. GCC's and GDB's current implementations of DWARF-2 (and 3) are > somewhat lacking, but it's all fixable. And, more importantly, in the process of being fixed. :) > > -- > Daniel Jacobowitz > MontaVista Software Debian GNU/Linux Developer