Re: GDB on Mac OS

[Joel Brobecker <brobecker at adacore dot com>]

> I just test builds of the current gdb (GIT master) on Mac OS 10.10.4.
> I built it with the stock LLVM, then with GDB 5.2.  Both require the
> configure switch --disable-build-warnings in order for things to build
> (the default blows up with compiler error messages).

The fact that it has build warnings is not too surprising. Outside
of GNU/Linux, I'm not sure it's building warning-free on any
other host. Building with --disable-werror is how we do it.

> I then ran âmake checkâ in the gdb subdirectory.  The results were
> slightly different for the two builds, but in both I see about 5000
> pass and a bit over 4000 fail.  Thatâs an awfully high fail
> percentage.  Is that expected?  Is GDB still intended to work on Mac
> OS?  Should I report details on the failures, and if so, what should I
> report and what logs are needed?

It's working pretty well for us. Probably not perfect, but fairly
well. A couple of things that come to mind:

  - I think we changed the default in AdaCore's compiler to build
    with -fno-common, although I'm not certain. You might want to
    try that and see if that brings you better results;

  - for actual debugging of a live inferior, the debugger needs
    to be codesigned - try with a simple example first to see
    if you can run a program and break somewhere.

MacOS 10.10 seems very old, at this point. We test on 13.4 and 14.3.

-- 
Joel