Re: Should strip discard the .ctf section ?

[Orlando Arias <orlandoarias at gmail dot com>]

Greetings,

On 10/7/19 5:03 PM, Michael Matz wrote:
> No idea how RPM came up in this context.  It's using scripts to do all 
> post processing and those could be changed quite easily of course.  IMO 
> it's more about users of binutils outside of package managers that are 
> affected by default strip behaviour.

Nick Alcock brought it up as an example of why the .ctf section should
be left by default. In fact, Nick Alcock has been talking about
packaging systems for a while now.

> It all comes down to one question: how should strip be told to not strip 
> .ctf? (a) via command line option, or (b) via existence of .ctf?  Both are 
> equivalent, because existence of .ctf implies a command line option to the 
> compiler, ergo an explicit request by the user.  Requiring a separate 
> command line option for strip in addition seems just pointless.

DWARF debug sections are only created if the compiler/assembler is told
to create them. The strip tool still removes them. Should we then revert
the functionality of strip so that your proposed behavior for .ctf is
also applied to DWARF debug sections, or should it remain the way it is
for historical reasons?

Also,

> Excellent.  So you won't use -gt to compile your stuff, et voila, no
> .ctf sections anywhere.  Without any changes on your part!

I recall this being mentioned:

On 10/5/19 3:40 PM, Nick Alcock wrote:
> Stripping it out by
> default will *always* be a choice that annoys the user, until -gt is
> turned on by default, which is not something I would expect to happen
> until CTF becomes widely used.

So, assuming that CTF becomes widely used, the moment that -gt becomes a
default in Autoconf scripts, we now have to change the way strip works
to remove the section since it is automatically added whenever building?
Or do we pass parameters to strip to also remove the section? It seems
to me the former would change historical behavior of the tool [for the
second time]. The latter would require modifying how strip is run,
whenever it is run.

Again, treat this as an outsider's view. My sincerest apologies if I
sound confrontational about the issue. That is not my intention. I can
see your viewpoint as well, and truth to be told, I can always change my
scripts to build things a certain way.

Cheers,
Orlando.

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