Re: RFA: Search for symbol names the same way they're hashed.

[Jim Ingham <jingham@apple.com>]

On Wednesday, October 2, 2002, at 02:50  PM, 
gdb-patches-digest-help@sources.redhat.com wrote:

>> We need to make demangling-style only affect *printout* and *user
>> entered strings*, and during symbol reading, force it to auto, so it
>> always gets the right names in the symbol table in the first place.
>
> Doesn't that sort of defeat the point of letting the user set
> demangling style?  It's in case something goes wrong with
> autodetection....
>
>>> The source code name of a symbol does not depend depend on the 
>>> current
>>> demangling setting;
>>
>> And to enforce this, you have to make the readers *not* honor the
>> demangling style. If you just fix SYMBOL_SOURCE_NAME,
>> SYMBOL_INIT_DEMANGLED_NAME will still be only called once, and it'll
>> have the wrong demangling style when it calls cplus_demangle, 
>> resulting
>> in the symbol having the wrong demangled name forevermore.
>
> Perhaps we need to decide what the point of letting users force the
> demangle style is, first.

The case where we have had to use this was because we had private C++ 
API's in some of the Mac OS X frameworks for 10.2 (which was compiled 
with gcc 3.1) but users who didn't want to move their C++ code to 3.1 
yet.  When you hit the frameworks, gdb would see _Z, and assume the 
mangling style was the 3.1 style.  Of course, all their code was 2.95, 
and they didn't in general care about the C++ stuff in frameworks 
(Apple tries not to export C++ API's if it can help it).  So forcing 
demangling to 2.95 was useful in this case.

This should, hopefully, be just a short term problem.  Very few of our 
customers are still using 2.95 that we know about.  But it is still 
worth keeping in mind for the next year or so...

Jim
--
Jim Ingham                                   jingham@apple.com
Developer Tools
Apple Computer