On Tue, Dec 07, 1999 at 01:54:43AM -0800, Sanjay Lal wrote:
> I was very surprised to learn that gdb isnt available with the
> distribution.
> Is there a specific reason for this?  Has some kind soul ported gdb
> to the macppc platform?  I have tried the patches available on
> ftp.netbsd.org, but none of them seem to work completely.

Last I heard, it was possible to get a working gdb running with
-current, but it doesn't cooperate well with FPU stuff on the ppc.

I never really had the full story, though (and haven't had time to
mess with anything requiring GDB on my macppc machine yet, so...)

Dan? Bill?

It's not very shocking that a debugger doesn't run. I mean, yeah, it's
a useful development tool that those writing software for macppc might
need, but since most of the software is kernel-related, you don't
really need an end-user style debugger (rather, you need kernel
debuggers, which exist), and writing debuggers is a *pain*, as the
compilers class I'm taking right now is teaching me... which implies
porting ones from another architecture will be none too easy (and this
stuff *is* architecture - or, at least, byte-order - dependant).

Until there's some commercial-scale (which includes open source stuff
like the Gimp) production being done on machines running NetBSD/macppc,
there won't be a real call for a debugger like gdb, and that won't
happen until the systems actually stable and complete, so...

(... and by that time, NetBSD development may have moved on to new,
other platforms and a macppc branch been added to FreeBSD, as has just
now started happening with some of the oldest NetBSD ports.)

       ~ g r @ eclipsed.net