Re: Forgot to note

[Michael Meissner <meissner at cygnus dot com>]

On Tue, Oct 10, 2000 at 08:38:50PM -0400, Daniel Berlin wrote:
> When the C++ abi moves to the new-abi, I can't fix stabs support
> without either adding a whole bunch of cruft, or making it not support
> the old ABI.
> 
> This is because things like gdb_mangle_name have to be changed to
> handle the new mangling scheme.
> So I have to either detect whether we have old-abi or new-abi
> somewhere, and then add a whole bunch of "if gnu-new-abi" type
> statements, or stop supporting the old abi for stabs/C++.
> 
> Currently, the consensus on gcc seems to be that linux should move to
> dwarf2 before 3.0 releases, which would mean that stopping support for
> new-abi/stabs would also be an option.
> 
> DWARF2 will work fine with either ABI automatically.
> 
> What should we do?
> Not support new-abi/stabs?
> Not support old-abi/stabs?
> Support both? (this is a not insignificant amount of work).

I think the only realistic solution is to support both.  Note, Linux is not the
only system out there that uses stabs (many of the embedded systems do to).
What are you going to do, compile some code with the new abi if no debugging
option were used and use the old abi if -g was used (on a system that supports
stabs as the native format).

-- 
Michael Meissner, Red Hat, Inc.
PMB 198, 174 Littleton Road #3, Westford, Massachusetts 01886, USA
Work:	  meissner@redhat.com		phone: +1 978-486-9304
Non-work: meissner@spectacle-pond.org	fax:   +1 978-692-4482