On Thu, Apr 8, 2021 at 10:41 AM Jeff Law <jeffreya...@gmail.com> wrote: > > On 4/8/2021 8:06 AM, Simon Marchi via Gcc wrote: > > On 2021-04-08 9:11 a.m., David Edelsohn wrote: > >>>> AIX continues to use and support STABS, although it is transitioning > >>>> to DWARF. If this is intended as a general statement about removal of > >>>> STABS support in GCC, > >>> Yes, it is. > >>> > >>> Richard. > >> Richard, > >> > >> It is inappropriate to unilaterally make this decision without > >> discussion with all affected ports and maintainers, without warning, > >> and without deprecation. I request that you rescind this decision. > >> > >> It is somewhat ironic to act as a dictator when we are having a > >> discussion about dictatorial behavior in GCC leadership. > > I don't really want to start such a debate about GCC politics. If stabs > > is not ready to be deleted, that's fine. But it would be good to go > > through all targets for which it is the default (like avr), and see if > > they are ready to be switched to DWARF. That's a baby step towards > > eventually deleting it. > > Agreed. I'd bet AIX is the outlier here and that most, if not all, > other ports that may currently be stabs-by-default can switch to > dwarf-by-default with no significant fallout. So we fix everything we > can while we wait for AIX to move forward.
I am not requesting a continuation of support for STABS to be obstinate. AIX has some support for DWARF, but STABS continues to be the primary debug format on AIX. Binutils does not fully function on AIX and the AIX native tools support for DWARF is incomplete. Also, AIX uses XCOFF file format, not ELF, so DWARF syntax needs to be adapted and all of the tools need to agree on the way that AIX symbols are represented in DWARF. IBM is adding support for AIX to LLVM and LLVM does not support STABS debugging, which has both exposed problems and is motivating work to resolve the gaps, but the additional features and fixes require time to implement and deploy. I am eager to transition to DWARF on AIX, but I continue to ask that the support not be removed until DWARF can be used as a complete substitute on AIX. I hope that full support for DWARF in AIX will be completed in 2022 and removal of GCC support for STABS can be targeted for GCC 13, not GCC 12. Thanks, David
