> I haven't seen that problem. As I said, all GDB tests pass when compiled with "-O3 -g".

Again, it depends on the optimization level, but IMHO it's not worth it to implement an heuristic to check if gdb has enough info to run tests.


> The fact that these GDB tests are not run in any CI build is bad.

gdb is not installed on Travis CI, but test_gdb is run on almost all buildbots.


> We should try to catch test breakage as early as possible, the buildbot should be the last resort.

Maybe open an issue to attempt to install gdb on Travis CI?

test_gdb breakage are quiet rare. If you modify code which can impact test_gdb, you can run test_gdb locally. Because breakages are rare, I never invested time on this issue: there are more blocking issues in my agenda ;-)