[PATCH RFC] Add debuginfod support to objdump and readelf

[Aaron Merey]

On Mon, Nov 25, 2019 at 7:32 AM Nick Clifton <nickc@redhat.com> wrote:
> It would helpful if you could include updates to the binutils/NEWS
> and binutils/doc/binutils.texi files as well.  It would also be
> really nice if you could create some new entries in the binutils
> testsuite to check the feature, but I can see how this might be
> rather hard to do.

Will do.

> I am slightly worried however about adding a new dependency to the
> binutils, albeit one that is only needed if enabled via a configuration
> option.  Is the database querying code in libdebuginfod complex ?
> Maybe it could be separated out into a separate library (ie not part of
> elfutils) or even imported directly into the binutils sources.
> (This probably is a bad idea, but I just wanted to check).

The debuginfod shared library used in this patch is distributed with elfutils
but it does not depend on any elfutils libraries and can be installed
separately.
This shlib simply issues HTTP GET requests to debuginfod servers using libcurl,
stores downloaded files in a local cache and makes them available to the
caller of the shlib functions. The database querying code is contained entirely
within the server, which is separate from the client shlib used in
this patch. So
I think that importing the server/database code into binutils would increase the
number of new dependencies and greatly increase the complexity of the code
being added to binutils.

> The configure check does not appear to work correctly.  I tried the
> following:
>
>   % mkdir /dev/shm/test
>   % cd /edv/shm/test
>   % /work/sources/binutils/current/configure --quiet --with-debuginfod --enable-gold
>   % make all-binutils
>   mkdir -p -- ./intl
>   Configuring in ./intl
>   mkdir -p -- ./binutils
>   Configuring in ./binutils
>   configure: error: debuginfod is missing or unusable
>   make: *** [Makefile:3566: configure-binutils] Error 1
>
> So the configure succeeded, but the build failed.  (This was on an
> x86_64 box running Fedora 29).

Ah so the check for the shlib and header should occur in
binutils-gdb/configure.ac, not binutils-gdb/binutils/configure.ac. That
should cause configure to fail properly. I will fix this in the next patch.

Aaron