Re: Status of Ada support in GDB?

[Joel Brobecker <brobecker at gnat dot com>]

Andreas,

> Trying to debug some Ada problems in GCC I noticed that GDB comes with
> Ada support files but does not link them at all, they just seem to be
> there for cosmetic :-(

Let me explain a bit the history behind these files, and why they are
not linked in yet. 

We, at ACT, are the original authors of these files, and have been
planning on submitting them for inclusion in the FSF tree as soon as
possible. There is no doubt in our minds that this would be beneficial
to everybody: the GDB community, the free software community, the Ada
community, and also ACT itself. So we are trying very hard on our side
to get this done. Unfortunately, due to commercial pressure and lack of
resources, we haven't be able to get this done yet.

So maybe a year ago, ACT made a "code dropping": our sources-du-jour
were made available for download on the sources.redhat.com ftp site.
The hope was that some people might find it useful, while we keep making
progress on cleaning up our code to get it to a state where it would be
acceptable for inclusion.

Somebody outside of ACT actually volunteered to merge these changes into
the FSF tree for us. He started by first sending a new patch that was
this time against the current sources (instead of current against an old
5.1 snapshot). He then checked in the ada-* files, and started cleaning
them up. The plan was for him to (more or less): cleanup these files,
add the bits in the makefiles to compile them in, and then activate
slowly all the ada functionality. Unfortunately, as it often happens,
this volunteer found a day job, and found that he could not spend time
on this task anymore.

So ACT is picking up the task again. We are getting much closer to
having something we can submit, one of our part-time consultant is
working full-time (if I may say so) on it. In the meantime, could you
try using the 5.1.1-based sources that we made available through
sources.redhat.com?

-- 
Joel