proposed symbol format deprecations

[Tristan Gingold]

On Dec 13, 2012, at 5:00 PM, Tom Tromey wrote:

> I've been working on some changes that touch most of the symbol readers,
> and I notice that a couple of them are barely active -- somread.c and
> mdebugread.c.
> 
> somread.c is used to read the HP-UX SOM format:
> 
>    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/System_Object_Model_%28file_format%29
> 
> It is only used on 32-bit PA-RISC systems.  somread.c can't even be
> built on other machines as it requires the HP-UX <syms.h>.

[ bfd for HP/PA is able to be cross-built ]

> 
> 
> mdebugread.c is used to read the ECOFF format:
> 
>    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ECOFF
> 
> It is most recently used, I think, by Tru64.
> 
> 
> I would like to propose deprecating both of these readers.

You should talk with the HP/PA GCC maintainer, as AFAIK only gdb is able to
debug gcc-generated binaries.

Tru64 is already deprecated in gcc.

Tristan.