Re: release soonish

[Cary Coutant <ccoutant at google dot com>]

> (Frankly IMHO it's a no-brainer that when DWARF introduced
> DW_FORM_sec_offset they should have added the ten distinct forms for the
> different target sections, it's not like we're really in danger of running
> out of form codes.  But they didn't ask me.)

We did consider that. But form codes are the one thing in DWARF that
you can't extend without breaking existing consumers -- you can skip
over unknown attributes and even unknown tags as long as you know all
the form codes involved, but once you see a form code you don't know,
you can't continue parsing the debug info at all. Therefore, we
thought it would set a bad precedent to encourage the creation of a
new form code for each new section you might want to point to from an
attribute.

The idea that the attribute itself implies the section you're
referring to was recognized to be a disadvantage to generic DWARF
utilities, but we figured that any such utility would either (a)
recognize the attribute and thus know which section is implied, or (b)
treat the offset as a general section offset. In the latter case, you
might lose some useful output (e.g., in readelf), or some error
checking (e.g., a dwarflint-like tool), but the tool would still be
able to operate on the file. The alternative is that the tool might
see a form code it doesn't recognize and not be able to operate on the
file at all.

-cary