Readelf vs objdump

[Stan Shebs]

So, fresh from the stunning success of Panther, and scanning the horizon for
new prey to consu^Wassim^Wadopt :-) , we've been looking a bit at the 
prospects
for moving from stabs to dwarf2 debugging. It's not too hard to tweak Darwin
GDB and GCC to get something minimal working using Mach-O object files, 
but in
order to scale up and improve performance, we could really use a dwarf 
dumper,
such as the one in readelf.

While it seems like an obvious thing to hack up the dwarf dumping code so
that it can be used in objdump for non-ELF, it makes me wonder why there 
is a
separate readelf program in the first place.  Is this just historical, or is
there a fundamental reason why binutils has two file dumpers? (I understand
that the details of functionality are different, but that's not a 
fundamental
reason to have two.)

Stan