Subject: Re: [bug#63008] gdb on aarch64

From: Pierre Langlois <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 24 Apr 2023 20:04:18 +0100

Hi Andreas, sorry I missed your reply!

Andreas Enge <[email-masked]> writes:

> Hello Pierre,
>
> we also have gdb@12 in core-updates; does this also not build? Right now
> none of the two have been built on aarch64 on CI, so I lack an overview.

Yup, gdb@12 builds just fine for me!

>
> On x86_64, both build; @12 has 101 dependents, @11 7563!
> This cannot be accomodated on core-updates any more, I am afraid.
>
> We will need to build it out afterwards. And probably the best course
> of action would be to move the dependents to gdb@12; or drop the
> dependency? Why do so many packages depend on a debugger?

Yeah gdb is used as a dependency for testing rust, I'm not sure if it
has to be 11, it can probably work with 12 although I haven't tried.

I think the main reason we still have gdb 11 is to make sure we don't
rebuild the rust world. I'm afraid if we don't do update it know, we'll
have to do it quite soon, can the rust world be rebuilt on a staging
branch soon after the core-updates merge? I'm concerned that these days
a lot relies on rust (via librsvg IIRC), so not having it available
might be an issue, even for simple systems :-/.

All that being said, it might be possible to add a separate [email-masked]
package, and only use it for rust on non-x86, in a way that doesn't
cause a rebuild, could that work?

Thanks,
Pierre