delorie.com/archives/browse.cgi   search  
Mail Archives: djgpp-workers/2001/07/09/06:43:14

Date: Mon, 9 Jul 2001 13:44:23 +0300 (IDT)
From: Eli Zaretskii <eliz AT is DOT elta DOT co DOT il>
X-Sender: eliz AT is
To: djgpp-workers AT delorie DOT com
Subject: bfdsymify
Message-ID: <Pine.SUN.3.91.1010709132923.7330B-100000@is>
MIME-Version: 1.0
Reply-To: djgpp-workers AT delorie DOT com

With the proliferation of use of non-COFF debugging by DJGPP users (I 
expect that to go up even more once GCC 3.0 and GDB 5.1 are released, 
with support for DWARF2), I think we should seriously consider 
distribution a version of SYMIFY linked with the BFD library (a.k.a. 
bfdsymify).  It is IMHO unreasonable to expect users to recompile their 
programs just to get a human-readable backtrace.

(An alternative to the backtrace is the core dump support, but since it's 
only being developed now, I think it's too early to consider it as a 
replacement for SYMIFY-type functionality.)

I have bfdsymify working for me for a couple of years with no visible 
problems.  So it can be considered stable enough to be used by every 
DJGPP user.

Do people think it's a good idea to release bfdsymify to the masses?  If 
so, I think we should discuss the practical ways of doing so.

When this issue surfaced some time ago, DJ suggested to submit the 
program for inclusion in the Binutils package, so that it will be always 
available withe every port of Binutils.  But this requires that bfdsymify 
be portable to platforms other than DJGPP, which is not easy, given the 
screen capture code.  (Btw, do GNU/Linux systems have a device yet that 
allows direct video memory access?)  I don't have time to do such ports, 
and don't have an easy access to GNU/Linux to test the ported code.  So, 
if we agree on this approach, Someone (tm) other than myself will have to 
sit down and make it happen.

Alternatively, we could make bfdsymify part of djdev, and augment the 
build process to build it only if libbfd.a is installed.

Yet another possibility is to distribute it as a separate package.

Thoughts?

- Raw text -


  webmaster     delorie software   privacy  
  Copyright © 2019   by DJ Delorie     Updated Jul 2019