Re: Obsoleting Solaris 10 support

Hi Joel,

>> Yesterday I've announced the obsoletion of Solaris 10 support in GCC 9
>> 
>> 	https://gcc.gnu.org/ml/gcc/2018-10/msg00139.html
>> 
>> I believe the same reasons cited there hold for GDB as well.  Besides,
>> we had some build failures recently that only occured on Solaris 10,
>> creating work to support a rapidly dwindling or even vanished user base.
>> Therefore, I wonder how best to handle this in GDB.
>> 
>> While GCC has roughly one release a year and GCC 9, the last relase to
>> support Solaris 10 with --enable-obsolete, will appear sometime next
>> spring, GDB has a release cycle of about 6 months.  Should we obsolete
>> Solaris 10 for GDB 8.3 now, getting a bit ahead of GCC, or rather wait
>> for GDB 8.4 instead?  My gut feeling is that it would be better to wait
>> for 8.4: more often than not GCC adds support for new DWARF versions or
>> other extensions, and it would be good to have a GDB that supports
>> what's in the GCC 9 release.
>
> I don't know of any particular issue that might create a strong
> reason for dropping Solaris 10 support in the short term; and
> I agree that it would be nice for the users on Solaris 10 to
> continue providing newer versions of GDB on that platform until
> GCC also stops. However, this is only really possible if contributors
> like yourself stand behind it. So, in my mind, I would continue with
> the default stand where we keep support by default as long as it doesn't
> unduly slows the rest of GDB development.

this would argue for an obsoletion in the GDB 8.4 timeframe, roughly at
the same time GCC itself does.  Issues I'm facing with Solaris 10 right
now (apart from the S10-only build breakages) are having to deal with
different syscall numbers while working on an xml syscall table for
Solaris and catch syscall support, as well as differences in corefile
contents.  I suspect there will be more as time goes on.

	Rainer

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Rainer Orth, Center for Biotechnology, Bielefeld University