Re: PATCH: Add archive support to ELF

["H. J. Lu" <hjl at lucon dot org>]

On Sat, Aug 09, 2003 at 07:09:10AM -0700, Ian Lance Taylor wrote:
> Andrew Cagney <ac131313@redhat.com> writes:
> 
> > >> Because the whole point of readelf is that it doesn't use the BFD
> > >> library.  In a very real sense, the entire readelf program is a
> > >> reinvention of the wheel.
> > > I don't think so. readelf provides much more and detailed ELF
> > > specific
> > > information than objdump or nm.
> > > What harm will readelf using libbfd do? Is someone planning to remove
> > > libbfd one day and still want to keep readelf.
> > 
> > Something to note here is that GDB would like access to more detailed
> > display functions found in readelf.  In particular the dwarf2 print
> > code.  Perhaps what's needed is a library that can print detailed
> > internals and then have both readelf and objdump use it.
> 
> The original point of BFD was to provide a generic interface to a
> number of different object file formats.
> 
> As we move to an ELF-only world, I think it becomes appropriate to
> write ELF-only tools.  readelf is an example of such a tool, not that
> that is what it was intended to be.
> 

There is such a tool, which is work in progress. Also not every place
is ELF-only. We have to deal with EFI/COFF on ia64. I don't see bintils
will go away anytime soon. All I want to do is read archive with
readelf without extracting a 100MB archive first. If people object, I
will leave this feature in my Linux binutils. I will take it out if
Linux people don't like it :-).


H.J.