Re: Backporting minor fix to older gdb releases

Hi,

On 3/22/23 09:57, Luis Machado via Gdb wrote:
> On 3/20/23 04:18, Joel Brobecker wrote:
>>>> FWIW, there is no real policy that I know of.
>>>>
>>>> We have been known to accept patches on release branches past the .2
>>>> release. It's been very rare, though. In all cases, the push was done
>>>> with the understanding that there would likely not be another official
>>>> release off that branch, so that was purely for the benefit of people
>>>> who wanted to build from the HEAD of a release branch rather than from
>>>> an official release.
>>>>
>>>> Whether we should be doing it in this case, I don't have a strong
>>>> opinion. I think Andrew is making good points, and I'm wondering
>>>> whether it will actually serve anyone if we backport the patches.
>>>> On the other hand, are the patches extra safe? If they are, perhaps
>>>> in the spirit of not standing in the way of someone willing to make
>>>> it better for others...
>>>>
>>>
>>> All reasonable points, I agree.
>>>
>>> The patch (a single one) is mostly trivial reordering of code to fix a
>>> pseudo-register number that we get wrong for the pauth feature. It
>>> helps in that it allows people to use gdb 9/10/11/12 with a new qemu.
>>> Otherwise those gdb's will just crash on connection, with no way
>>> around it.
>>
>> This part I understood. The part I wasn't sure about is whether
>> there was any known entity that would pick the branch update up,
>> and rebuild with it.
> 
> I was thinking the main distros would pick it up (but can't be sure they will).
> 
>>
>> Nevertheless, this is not critical at all. As long as the patch
>> is extra safe (which it looks like it can't possibly cause things
>> to be worse, except in the pauth case which is already crashing),
>> I don't see a reason why we should block the patch's inclusion
>> in our older branches. You can go right ahead.
>>
> 
> Thanks Joel. I'll do this over the course of the week/next week.

The qemu devs have decided to postpone the change that would've caused older gdb's to break.

We're now discussing side-stepping older gdb's by making qemu and gdb exchange the same information
via a different xml feature string.

Given the above, I decided to drop the backports idea.