Re: [Fwd: Is anyone using the HP compilers on PA-RISC with FSF GDB?] (fwd)

[Daniel Jacobowitz <drow at false dot org>]

On Wed, Aug 02, 2006 at 03:16:56PM -0400, John David Anglin wrote:
> > > I have a question, though, which I think I've asked before.  GCC on
> > > HP/UX uses stabs, so only requires basic SOM support from GDB.  That
> > 
> > There have been requests for ELF debug support.  The main issue as
> > far as I can see is the lack of named sections and where to put stuff.

Do you mean DWARF-2 here?  If so, I completely agree.  It seems like
SOM has some named sections - at least we're managing to get objdump to
tell me there's a GDB_STRINGS section - so I don't know what the
problem is.

> > > should be in decent shape still.  But the stuff read by hpread.c is
> > > only generated by the HP compilers (cc and aCC).
> > > 
> > > - Are these compilers still important for C?
> > > - Are these compilers still important for C++?
> > 
> > Oh, I'm sure these compilers are still important to some people.
> > However, I don't see the need to maintain support for the debug
> > format generated by these compilers.  There's no debug info in any
> > of the system libraries, so this capability doesn't help development
> > of open source applications under HP-UX.
> > 
> > I should also say that access to HP compilers is necessary to
> > maintain this code.  Thus, it really can only be done by HP.  If
> > they don't maintain it, then it should be removed.

At one point in the past, the Compaq testdrive systems offered aCC.  I
don't think they do any more though.

Thanks for the response, Dave - if you don't think we need to hold on
to aCC support, then I doubt anyone else will either.  However, there's
no need to rush; I'll wait for at least a few weeks, in case anyone
else has comments, and then come back to this if no one does.

> > On the otherhand, GCC C, C++, Ada and Java are now working quite well
> > on PA-RISC for both Linux and HP-UX.  So, I would suggest that we need
> > to focus support in these areas.  Of course, I'm a bit biased ;)

I'd be much happier working on support for GCC :-)  Especially if that
means DWARF-2 debug information!

-- 
Daniel Jacobowitz
CodeSourcery