Opening the debugger with additional switches

[simonjwright]

GDB bug 11385 means that GDB on macOS (and possibly other systems) can’t catch exceptions with FSF GCC:

(gdb) catch exception
Your Ada runtime appears to be missing some debugging information.
Cannot insert Ada exception catchpoint in this configuration.

The easiest fix is to use additional switches on opening GDB (-readnow): gdb -readnow foo.
How can I arrange this in GPS?

(as a side note, is it correct that I have to say catch exception in the debugger console?)

[setton]

There is no way at the moment to specify the switches passed to the debugger... I would suggest fixing this at the GDB level rather than adding workarounds at the GPS level.

From an user's perspective, it should be possible to catch exceptons after doing an initial "start/begin" in the debugger, right?

[simonjwright]

From an user's perspective, it should be possible to catch exceptons after doing an initial "start/begin" in the debugger, right?

No.

(gdb) start
Temporary breakpoint 1 at 0x100007338: file cxag001.adb, line 103.
Starting program: /Users/simon/ACATS/t/cxag001 
[New Thread 0x1403 of process 5479]
warning: unhandled dyld version (15)

Temporary breakpoint 1, _ada_cxag001 () at cxag001.adb:103
103	procedure CXAG001 is
(gdb) catch exception
Your Ada runtime appears to be missing some debugging information.
Cannot insert Ada exception catchpoint in this configuration.

So the alternative is to build a special version of GDB for macOS users that does -readnow without being asked.
Or maybe one could do some shell/path fudge (would be less work).

[setton]

@simonjwright, one "workaround" suggestion: you could create a "gdb" script which would be a simple wrapper to the real gdb, just invoking it with -readnow and the rest of the arguments, and then place this in front of your PATH - would this work for you?