Date: Thu, 07 Dec 2000 23:31:20 +0200
From: "Eli Zaretskii" <eliz AT is DOT elta DOT co DOT il>
Sender: halo1 AT zahav DOT net DOT il
To: Hans-Bernhard Broeker <broeker AT physik DOT rwth-aachen DOT de>
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	Hans-Bernhard Broeker on Thu, 7 Dec 2000 18:32:00 +0100 (MET))
Subject: Re: DJGPP linker script update
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> 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.