Re: Bizarre GCC problem - how do I debug it?

[Bruce Korb <bruce.korb@gmail.com>]

On Fri, Aug 6, 2010 at 11:19 AM, David Daney <ddaney@caviumnetworks.com> wrote:
>> That seems to work.  There are one or two or three bugs then.
>> Either gdb needs to recognize an out of sync object code
>
> It cannot do this as it was released before GCC-4.5.

GDB and GCC communicate with each other with particular conventions.
Conventions will change over time.  GCC cannot really know which debugger
is going to be used, so it just emits its code and debug information.
GDB, on the other hand, needs to know what conventions were used when
the binaries were produced.  If it cannot tell, it is a GCC issue _and_ a
GDB issue.  If it can tell and chooses to indicate the problem by supplying
bogus responses, then it is solely a GDB bug.  Either way, we have a bug.

>> And, of course, the insight stuff needs to incorporate the latest
>> and greatest gdb.  (I don't use ddd because it is _completely_ non-
>> intuitive.)
>
> My understanding is that whoever packages GCC and GDB for a particular
> distribution is responsible to make sure that they work together.
>
> In your case it looks like that didn't happen.

openSuSE seems to think that ddd is an adequate debugger.  I do not.
I use insight.  There is no automatic update to insight and insight does
not currently have a 7.x release of the underlying GDB.  They are tightly
bound.  :(

Anyway, I now know what the problem is and I am anxiously awaiting a
new release of Insight -- and I recommend some protocol versioning fixes
for GDB and, possibly, GCC too.