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 _______________________________________________ elfutils-devel mailing list [email protected] https://fedorahosted.org/mailman/listinfo/elfutils-devel
