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Re: elfutils / man pages


On Sun, 19 Apr 2009, Roland McGrath wrote:

>> is the goal for elfutils to eventually supplant binutils with a newer
>> set of tools on ELF-only platforms or just to provide alternate
>> implementations (or a baseline for alternate tooling) which would sit
>> along-side binutils?
>
> Those kinds of goals are pretty abstract given the realities of where we
> are now.  I don't find it real meaningful to say what "the goal" is in the
> absence of any material plans, schedules, or resource commitments to get
> there.
>
> Many of the tools that elfutils provides now are as probably good or better
> than their binutils counterparts (addr2line, ar, nm, ranib, readelf, size,
> strings, strip).  Some of those are already used in preference to binutils
> tools in some production build processes (eu-strip in rpm builds).  In
> these cases, we might think those programs are ready to "supplant" their
> binutils counterparts (or might be soon with only moderate effort).
>
> Other tools are already significant new features that binutils has never
> had and probably never will (elfcmp, elflint, unstrip, with dwarfcmp and
> dwarflint coming later).
>
> elfutils in recent times have been in the DWARF-related areas that mostly
> do not show up as new command line tools.  Those goals are more or less
> unrelated to providing the other command line tools binutils has that
> elfutils does not have equivalently functional implementations of yet
> (objcopy, objdump, as, ld) and/or making the already "more finished"
> elfutils tools listed above be better/sufficient drop-in replacements for
> their binutils counterparts (and verifying the world of uses, etc.).
>
> The "if we could wave a wand" goals include perfectly featureful ld, as,
> etc. so that elfutils tools would replace binutils tools for all uses we
> think are not insane.  (Various BFD features like support for non-ELF
> formats or strange embedded targets we would do in different ways rather
> than ways necessarily drop-in compatible, if at all.)  Work toward those
> goals happens sporadically, basically in hackers' personal spare time, and
> is not formally planned or scheduled at all.  (Perhaps this is what you
> meant by "a baseline for alternate tooling", I'm not sure.)
>
> As I indicated, all the proximate goals are library, API, and arcane kinds
> of tool things, not the rest of what the average person probably thinks
> elfutils and binutils are about.  Both are in fact about more things than
> the familiar collection of command-line tools.

ok.

so the dev community is interested primarily in the library work, and
the user community is often the dev community. Fine, fine. I don't
think I'm the right person to write documentation on the library.

OTOH, I'm happy to document anything in /bin or /usr/bin. Interest
sounded tepid, but I'll try and start somewhere...

Andrew

>
>
> Thanks,
> Roland
>


--
Andrew Hecox
Technical Account Manager, Red Hat, Inc
office: 919 754 4157, cell: 919 758 9234


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