Re: RFA: handle "MiniDebuginfo" section

[Pedro Alves <palves@redhat.com>]

On 14-11-2012 19:37, Doug Evans wrote:

> 1) Being more of a minimalist when it comes to adding new stuff, and
> applying "It's easier to relax restrictions than impose them after the fact."

While in general I agree with this,

> it would be easy enough to restrict the section to being an (lzma-compressed)
> ELF file (and equally easy to relax the restriction if someone ever presented
> a compelling reason to support it).  Sure, we *can* support COFF, etc. but
> that doesn't, to me, mean we *should*.
> Does Redhat have a *formal* spec of .gnu_debugdata that says COFF, etc. is
> supported. [If that's the case then my point is moot,
> but I couldn't find any such formal spec.]

I disagree with artificially making this ELF only.  What you find stuffed in a
.gnu_debugdata section is just another file that would otherwise be loadable by
gdb if it was separate on the filesystem.  IOW, stuffing the file as compressed
binary blob into .gnu_debugdata is just a replacement for making the file
really separate on the file system.  There's really nothing container-specific
(coff/elf,whatnot) in this.

-- 
Pedro Alves