rfg@lupine.ncd.com (Ron Guilmette) (06/07/91)
SEEKING SPONSOR -- GNU GDB debugger for System V Release 4 Project ======================================================================== As some of you may know, I have for some time been working on the development of GNU tools (most notably the GNU C compiler and the GNU GDB symbolic debugger). In my current contract work for NCD I have been adding support for the System V Release 4 object file format (ELF) and for the System V Release 4 symbolic debugging information format (DWARF). (My work on adding DWARF generation to GCC was finished some months ago and has been generously donated by NCD to the Free Software Foundation. It is now publically available to all interested parties. Likewise, my work to date on GDB has also been donated to the Free Software Foundation.) Due to recent adjustments to business goals and plans, the current sponsor of this work (Network Computing Devices) does not wish to persue the continued development of GNU tools for ELF and DWARF at this time. I however would like an opportunity to complete my work on getting GDB to understand ELF and DWARF. I have already invested many months of my life in the pursuit of this goal and I'm not ready to abandon this effort, especially since it is well more than 50% completed. I am now in the process of seeking some firm or organization which would have an interest in seeing this work completed, and which would have a significant enough interest in seeing GDB running on their own platforms that a machine (running svr4) and some nominal funding could be provided to me in return for the completion of this work and the delivery of a set of working sources and binaries for an svr4 based GDB. This project would of course be contingent upon an "up-front" agreement that the receipiant would donate the *additional* source code developed during the completion of this project to the Free Software Foundation. If you, your company, or your organization might have an interest in sponsoring the completion of such a project, I urge you to contact me as quickly as possible. You may contact me via E-mail at the addresses listed below, or you may reach me at 415-961-2114 (days) or at 408-732-7839 (evenings). P.S. The work I have done on GDB to date has included providing a complete set of "hooks" so that robust support for C++ can easily be added onto the initial version (which will only support C) at a leter time. Additionally, support for quick start-up's (via incremental symbol table reading) has been fully provided for.