ld CTF deduplicator should be coming fairly soon (was Re: genscripts comment tidy)

[Nick Alcock]

On 16 Oct 2019, Nick Alcock spake thusly:
> On 16 Oct 2019, Nick Clifton spake thusly:
> > No. :-(  But it would be nice to have.  Fancy writing a node in
> > the ld.texi file ?
> Maybe in a week or two. I really really want to get a working CTF
> deduplicator posted here first. :)

Oh ha ha ha, hark at my foolish optimism. After literally months of
going up various blind alleys I have this working at long last and am
getting it into shape for posting in the next week or two (as multiple
series, preparatory stuff and bugfixes in existing code first,
deduplicator second, with a bunch of ld performance and resulting-
CTF-size figures in the cover letter for the second series).

Minimal impact outside libctf/ (a couple of new command-line options to
enable different varieties of type deduplication that authors of very
large codebases might like: would -z be a suitable place in the option
space for that? Perhaps -z ctf-*? I've never been entirely on what -z
stands for...)

Going silent like this is bad of me, sorry. I'll try not to do it again:
with ld dedup in, libctf approaches usability (with only one more libctf
feature needed before GDB can map from symbols to types without DWARF)
and it becomes more important that I pay attention!

Catching up with massive binutils list backlog first, but if it turns
out nobody's documented the genscripts stuff in the meantime, I might
get to writing that genscripts texinfo node :)