Qt Creator (GDB) No Watch Variables With GCC 4.8

The next set of changes are rather complicated and required debugging.  Upon reaching the first breakpoint, no variables were displayed in the Locals and Expressions debugging window in Qt Creator.  After a little research, the problem was determined to be with GCC 4.8.1, which is using a new format (named DWARF-4) to write debugging symbols to the executable.

The problem is that GDB (debugger) does not support this newer format, at least older versions prior to GDB 7.5.  Mint 13 (Ubuntu 12.04) has only version 7.4.  This problem does not affect Windows with the programs installed as recently described (see the Windows tagged posts).  The latest MSYS with MinGW has GDB 7.6.1 and MinGW-w64 has GDB 7.7.  Mint 17 (Ubuntu 14.04) is also fine with GDB 7.7.

There are two ways to solve this problem.  The GCC compiler has an option for generating the older DWARF-3 format debugging symbols.  Instead of permanently adding this option to the CMake build file, the following option can be added to the CMake command line or in Arguments field in the Run CMake wizard within Qt Creator:

-DCMAKE_CXX_FLAGS_DEBUG='-g -gdwarf-3'

The other solution is to build and install GDB from source code.  Click Continue... for details on the procedure for this.