Should strip discard the .ctf section ?

[Nick Clifton <nickc at redhat dot com>]

Hi Nick, Hi Jose,

  I wanted to raise an issue that came up at the GNU Tools Cauldron 
  regarding the CTF debug format.  Specifically, since this is a debug 
  format, should strip remove the .ctf section when it is removing other 
  debug sections ?

  I understand that the CTF format is intended to be used in situations
  where DWARF is too big, and that you would want it retained in binaries
  that are otherwise stripped.  But from a user point of view, this is a
  discrepancy in the normal behaviour of the strip program.

  What I would suggest therefore is that we add a new configure time
  option to the binutils subdirectory that allows toolchain builders to
  decide whether .ctf is stripped by default.  If the option is not set,
  then the current behaviour (of not stripping it) would be retained.
  I do not think that we need to add a new option to objcopy/strip to
  delete the section, since users can already use --remove-section=.ctf.

  Oh, and if the toolchain is configure so that .ctf sections are 
  removed when --strip-debug or the like are used, then --only-keep-debug
  would definitely have to keep the .ctf section.

  What do you think ?

Cheers
  Nick