[Gm2] Bad news debugging on Solaris/Sparc

[John O Goyo]

The problem is that one cannot debug binaries built with gm2 with gdb
under Solaris/Sparc.  (I do not know about Solaris/Intel.)  Source can
be compiled and linked with "-g", and run without incident but the
resulting binary has more than one ".debug_str" section (as noted by
elfdump).  When the resulting binary is loaded into GDB, the latter
proclaims that "DW_FORM_strp pointing outside of .debug_str" and
nothing works -- source cannot be viewed and breakpoints cannot be
set.  It seems that GDB expects only one such section and takes the
first such as the unique section.  Thus anything that points beyond
the said section cannot be resolved.  (I learned the cause via some
judicial surfing.)

I found several bug reports on this submitted to GDB.  The GDB
maintainers do not regard this behaviour as incorrect.  They regard
such binaries as broken (despite noting that Sun's debugger handles
multiple sections within a single binary).

However, C binaries built with the corresponding gcc compiler can be
debugged without incident.  I do not know when gm2's behaviour
changed.  I am investigating.

john