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Re: FreeBSD 4.6 - binutils 2.14 installs useless libbfd


John Levon <levon@movementarian.org> writes:

> Furthermore, the parts of libbfd we actually use (namely, reading
> symbols and debug info) have had stable APIs for ages.

Incidentally, this is actually incorrect.  The APIs are stable from
the point of source code, but they aren't stable from the point of
view of shipping a shared library which provides them.  That's because
of BFD's habit of using a vector of function pointers, and providing a
lot of functionality via macros.

Even something as simple as bfd_get_symcount() is not stable from the
point of view of a shared library, because it might change every time
we add a field to struct bfd.  For example, the change made on
2003-01-27 to add an id field changed the shared library API with
respect to bfd_get_symcount().  That is, a program compiled before
2003-01-27 will not work if run against a libbfd.so built after
2003-01-27.

That is the sort of hassle which the binutils maintainers are electing
not to deal with.

On Fri, Sep 12, 2003 at 10:53:43AM -0700, H. J. Lu wrote:

> Well the world is larger than Linux. To go back to the original subject,
> I assume that the status is "don't care" due to the aforementioned
> unwillingness to support libbfd as a general library ?

I agree with that description.  Nick is the overall maintainer, so he
can make a different decision.

Ian


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