Long link times and elf_bfd_discard_stabs

[Nick Clifton]

Hi Jamie,

> I'm working on a project using mostly C++ which taking a very long
> time to link, using mips-elf-ld from binutils-2.13.

> The "deleting discardable stabs" patch was added almost 2 years ago,

> It looks like it is just trying to mop up unused debugging symbols, is
> that right?

Right.

> Are they harmless if I leave them in there?  

Yes and no.  If you leave them in then applications will be larger,
taking up more disk space and making them longer to load.  But it
should not stop the application from actually working.


> In that case, can I safely disable this by going back to
> ${LDEMUL_FINISH-NULL} in elf32.em?

Yes, but - I would strongly recommend making this decision based on a
command line option.  For example you could return without discarding
if "link_info.optimize" was zero.

Cheers
        Nick