Re: gnatlink error on Debian Woody

[Ludovic Brenta <ludovic.brenta@skynet.be>]

Preben Randhol <randhol+valid_for_reply_from_news@pvv.org> writes:

> On 2003-11-11, Frank Piron <frank.piron@konad.de> wrote:
> >
> > Finally i detected the cause of the problem.
> > I used - like you - the gnat.traceback.symbolic package.
> > This package contains the linker pragma "-laddr2line" in
> > file g-trasym.adb of the Debian - Gnat distribution. 
> 
> Will it work if you remove the    
> 
>    pragma Linker_Options ("-laddr2line");
> 
> or will gnat.traceback.symbolic break?
> 
> Preben

It will break.

Unfortunately, symbolic tracebacks are a recurring issue with GNAT.
The binary distribution from ACT contains a libaddr2line built from an
old version of GNU binutils.  Very few GNU/Linux distributions, if
any, include libaddr2line.  This is actually not a problem with GNAT
itself but with recent versions of binutils.  I've tried GNAT for
several distributions and never found one that did support symbolic
tracabacks.  I myself had to give up on the issue when packaging GNAT
3.15p for Debian.

It is an annoyance to not have symbolic tracebacks, but not a major
loss of functionality.  You can always run addr2line manually on
non-symbolic tracebacks or run your program under GDB to achieve the
same effect.  Besides, proper Ada programs do not raise exceptions
anyway, do they? :)

As I said earlier, if the OP links their program with libaddr2line,
they must then distribute it with the resulting executable.  If the
program is non-free, this might be a problem because the GNU binutils
are under GPL, not LGPL.

-- 
Ludovic Brenta.