[gdb] Pushing the D patches upstream (again)

[Robert Clipsham]

After working on the debug information produced by dmd recently, I 
started wondering what happened to the efforts to get the gdb patches 
pushed upstream.

http://d.puremagic.com/issues/show_bug.cgi?id=3207
http://sourceware.org/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=10142

After reading the threads attached to these bug reports I thought I'd 
ask the gdb developers what the current status was. Here's a log of the 
conversation we had on IRC (on chat.freenode.net in #gdb):
----
( mrmonday) does anyone here know the status of 
http://sourceware.org/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=10142 ?
( tromey) ISTR that we're waiting for a patch refresh
( tromey) or maybe some bit of paperwork
( tromey) I do think the patch was reviewed and needed a few changes
( tromey) but I forget exactly what
( mrmonday) it'd be good if we knew what, I've been doing quite a bit of 
work regarding the debug info produced by the main D compiler to make 
sure it's playing nicely with GDB, if there's anything I can do to help 
get the patches moved along it'd be good to know
( tromey) I'm looking for the thread but having trouble finding it
( tromey) yeah, I can't find it readily
( tromey) we really rely on contributors to ping their patches or to 
rewrite them after a review
( mrmonday) hmm, guess we need to chase some people up then if we want 
gdb to support D
( tromey) the paperwork might already all be done, I am not positive
( tromey) basically a patch like this needs someone to champion it
( mrmonday) and what does that involve?
( tromey) nothing formal :)
( tromey) just submitting it, then dealing with the review
( tromey) fixing whatever issues there are
( tromey) from my POV, what happened with this patch is that it got 
reviewed, then the submitters disappeared
( mrmonday) that story sounds far too common :s
( tromey) :)
( mrmonday) what would be needed to get it back off the ground again?
( tromey) two things
( tromey) first, verify that anybody who contributed to the patch has 
signed paperwork
( tromey) second, somebody (who has also signed paperwork) to resubmit 
the patch and then respond to reviews, ping it if it languishes, etc
( mrmonday) I think everyone that needs to have signed has done, as the 
last comment on the bug report was asking for confirmation that the FSF 
had recieved them
( tromey) yeah, I would guess so
( tromey) it is good to be certain
( mrmonday) if they have been recieved then the patch should be able to 
move in, once the issues with it have been resolved (we'd need to know 
what they are) and it's been updated to the latest gdb source code
( tromey) yeah
( tromey) you could either find the review thread from the last 
submission, or just update the patch to gdb head and resubmit it
( tromey) I'd suggest fixing the formatting problems too, since that is 
a known thing
----
So it seems what is needed is to:
a) Find out the status of the paperwork
b) Get the patch up to scratch and resubmit it

As Leandro Lucarella was heading up the efforts last time, he is 
probably the best person to talk to about part a. If that's all up to 
scratch, then we need to sort out the patch. To do this, we need to:

1) Update the patch to gdb head
2) Sort out the formatting issues so it matches the GNU style guidelines 
(http://www.gnu.org/prep/standards/standards.html - fun task :))
3) This seems to be the thread where it was discussed before (Not 100% 
though, there may be others): 
http://sourceware.org/ml/gdb-patches/2010-01/msg00204.html - We need to 
scour this thread and make sure everything in the patch is as requested. 
 From my quick flick through it seems that the patch was almost ready 
for inclusion in gdb 7.1 but didn't quite make it.

While we're on the topic of gdb patches, it might also be good to note 
http://d.puremagic.com/issues/show_bug.cgi?id=4044 which is a tracker 
bug for all gdb and debugging info related issues. A few of these have 
patches which are awaiting review or inclusion, and some need looking 
at... It could be good to get these issues fixed before the patch is 
included in gdb.

It seems that Mihail Zenkov is currently pushing for this too, as he's 
the current maintainer of the gdb-patches at 
http://dsource.org/projects/gdb-patches/, and according to the thread 
linked above he's been actively involved in getting the patch up to date 
(it seems there's a more recent patch in the thread than the repository, 
I'm not sure how up to date it is).

I'd be interested to know if anyone knows the current status of the D 
patches and what needs doing to get them included, it seems we're 
getting close to where we need to be to get D support into mainstream 
gdb, we just need the last push though.