Mail Archives: djgpp-workers/2000/12/07/17:10:23
> Date: Thu, 7 Dec 2000 18:32:00 +0100 (MET)
> From: Hans-Bernhard Broeker <broeker AT physik DOT rwth-aachen DOT de>
>
> So the first step would be to try and get those changes back go into the
> Binutils sources, I'd say. There's no point having the changes at hand and
> not filing them back to the binutils team, IMHO.
I'm not sure the way I chose out of the mess is sufficiently general.
Anyway, addr2line made an impression of a demo program that nobody
maintains seriously.
> > I meant to add core file support to bfdsymify [...]
>
> In that case, the updated version of bfdsymify should probably be built
> from a subset of the GDB sources, and hence become a member of the GDB
> package, not of binutils. It's essentially a special-purpose micro-gdb,
> after all.
I looked into GDB at the time, when I worked on bfdsymify, trying to
understand what will it take to base it on GDB (since GDB is so much
better in printing tracebacks). I came to a conclusion that it would
be a nightmare. GDB's symbol-handling code is tremendously complex,
includes two levels (minsyms and symbols), and was not written to be
wripped off into a separate library.
In other word, you will need to link against the full libgdb.a, which
will give you an executable approximately the size of GDB. It isn't
worth it.
> [BTW: other programs also seem to do their own core file reading rather
> than using the BFD --- e.g. gprof.]
Yes, it's a chicken-and-egg problem: no one uses BFD to read symbols,
so BFD doesn't have good facilities to read symbols, so no one uses
BFD to read symbols... etc., etc.
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