Re: [patch] PR ld/11817 Revert part of compressed debug patch to fix ld breakage

[Cary Coutant <ccoutant at google dot com>]

>> I was thinking the right way to do this would probably be to keep the
>> section name unchanged, but change the section type from SHT_PROGBITS
>> to SHT_GNU_COMPRESSED_BITS.
>
> Doing this may trigger more changes. In theory, ?no one should
> depend on section name. You can get the original section name
> by checking the new decompressed bit.

Sorry, I didn't finish the thought, and I don't think it was clear
what I meant. I meant that, if I were doing this from scratch, instead
of naming the compressed sections ".zdebug_info", etc., I'd have kept
the names unchanged, but changed the section type from SHT_PROGBITS to
SHT_GNU_COMPRESSED_BITS in the ELF section table, and readers would
have known that decompression was necessary based on the section type
instead of the section name (agreeing with your assertion that no one
should depend on the section name). I'd have changed gas to output the
new section type when compressing, and changed bfd and gold to
decompress any SHT_GNU_COMPRESSED_BITS section.

I think that would have been more elegant, but it would have probably
been a more difficult transition, as older tools would not have
gracefully ignored the compressed sections.

-cary