local variables not visible

[Peter Hoffmann]

Dear Mr/Ms gdb;

My favorite debugger, but I can not upgrade from 4.17 to neither 4.18 nor 5.0
because some local variables are not visible when compiled with -g:

if(a==0)
{
   double notvisible =0;
}

If I compile with -ggdb, the variable gets visible, but the size of the code
gets doubled - very slow load.  -m486 does not help either. 

I tried recompiling the source code with confid i586-redhat-linux. 

Please advise if you have time:
Peter