On Wed, 2005-11-16 at 20:33 -0700, Jeffrey A Law wrote: > > Our understanding was that the debugger actually uses the symbol table, > > in addition to the debugging information, in some cases. (This must be > > true when not running with -g, but I thought it was true in other cases > > as well.) It might be true for other tools, too. > I can't offhand recall if GDB actually uses the minimal symbols (the > symbol table) for anything if there are debug symbols available.
It does, but only after trying the debug symbols first. I discovered this when deep hacking into the symbol code of GDB a while ago. Apparently, some people enjoy breakpointing symbols by using the fully mangled name, which appears (nowadays) mainly in the minsym table. > But > even if we prove GDB doesn't use those symbols, we should still > keep them -- other tools, or even other debuggers (Etnus?) might still > use the symbols from the symbol table. > > Jeff >
