Re: Patch to fix PR9861

[Andrew Haley <aph@redhat.com>]

Ian Lance Taylor writes:
 > Andrew Haley <aph@redhat.com> writes:
 > 
 > >  > I would expect similar behavior from GDB (except that in GDB, the
 > >  > lack of demangling would really complicate things more than the
 > >  > same lack in binutils).  So, my opinion is that GDB is the main
 > >  > problem here, since this patch effectively makes Java debugging
 > >  > very difficult with an unpatched GDB.
 > > 
 > > It does.  However, it might be possible to persuade people to ship
 > > updated bnutils on free operating systems.  Unfree systems are going
 > > to be much more problematic, though.
 > 
 > How much do we care?

That's a good question.  I don't know, really: what I do know is that
I don't want to be fielding many bug reports about this.  

 > Presumably we are talking about people who are downloading their
 > own gcc and building it themselves.  Otherwise, keeping gcc and gdb
 > in synch is the responsibility of the distributor.  People who
 > download their own gcc can always download their own gdb.

I agree.  However, I think we should be fairly careful about the
timing for this change.  One thought: if we make this change just
before 4.1 branches, we'll have the branch stabilization period to get
the changes pushed through to gdb and binutils.

Andrew.