[Gm2] Debugging woes under Solaris 10/sparc

[John O Goyo]

Here is a problem that has been open since gm2 switched from stabs to 
dwarf.  I thought that a solution was found.  It turned out that I had 
no direct solution and I have been remiss in not reporting this sooner.

Problem: On Solaris 9, gdb understands gm2's dwarf output.  On Solaris 
10, gdb does not understand gm2's dwarf output.  (Note that gdb 
understands gcc's dwarf output, that is, the output produced by the gcc 
part of the gm2 build on Solaris 10.) I looked around the gdb mailing 
lists and did find others with the same problem.  Unfortunately, the 
maintainers of gdb regard the problem as being in the output and not 
with gbd.  I am conversant enough with the dwarf standard to render 
judgement.  At any rate, dbx (from Sun's Studio 10) understands gm2's 
dwarf output and I use that at the moment.

Example debugging sessions with gdb and dbx follow.

===[gdb]==============================================================
GNU gdb 6.2.1
Copyright 2004 Free Software Foundation, Inc.
GDB is free software, covered by the GNU General Public License, and you are
welcome to change it and/or distribute copies of it under certain 
conditions.
Type "show copying" to see the conditions.
There is absolutely no warranty for GDB.  Type "show warranty" for details.
This GDB was configured as "sparc-sun-solaris2.10"...DW_FORM_strp 
pointing outside of .debug_str section [in module 
/home/johng/prj/test/hello]

(gdb) b _M2_hello_init
No symbol table is loaded.  Use the "file" command.
======================================================================

On the other hand, the Solaris 10 dbx has no objection to the dwarf file 
formats...

===[dbx]==============================================================
For information about new features see `help changes'
To remove this message, put `dbxenv suppress_startup_message 7.4' in 
your .dbxrc
Reading hello
Reading ld.so.1
Reading libc.so.1
(dbx) stop in _M2_hello_init
(2) stop in _M2_hello_init
(dbx) run
Running: hello
(process id 4614)
Reading libc_psr.so.1
stopped in _M2_hello_init at line 9 in file "hello.mod"
    9       i := 4;
(dbx) list
    9       i := 4;
   10       WriteString("Hello?");
   11       WriteLn;
   12       INC(i)
   13   END hello.
======================================================================

So I currently either debug on a Solaris 9 box or use dbx as a stand-in 
(even though it does not understand modula-2 syntax).

john