Debugging with gdb on a program with no optimization but still there is no symbol in the current context for local variables

As noted in the release notes for GCC 4.8 (i.e. current trunk):

DWARF4 is now the default when generating DWARF debug information. When -g is used on a platform that uses DWARF debugging information, GCC will now default to -gdwarf-4 -fno-debug-types-section.
GDB 7.5, Valgrind 3.8.0 and elfutils 0.154 debug information consumers support DWARF4 by default. Before GCC 4.8 the default version used was DWARF2. To make GCC 4.8 generate an older DWARF version use -g together with -gdwarf-2 or -gdwarf-3. The default for Darwin and VxWorks is still -gdwarf-2 -gstrict-dwarf.

So you need to use GDB 7.5 or compile with -g -gdwarf-2