Re: too many "no debugging symbols found" messages from shared libs

[Doug Evans <dje@google.com>]

On Sun, Nov 23, 2008 at 8:10 PM, Eli Zaretskii <eliz@gnu.org> wrote:
>> Date: Sat, 22 Nov 2008 11:07:48 -0800
>> From: Paul Pluzhnikov <ppluzhnikov@google.com>
>> Cc: Doug Evans <dje@google.com>, mark.kettenis@xs4all.nl,         brobecker@adacore.com, gdb-patches@sourceware.org
>>
>> On Sat, Nov 22, 2008 at 3:58 AM, Eli Zaretskii <eliz@gnu.org> wrote:
>>
>> > Can we find a good way of supporting both these use cases?
>>
>> Any library under /lib{,64}, /usr/lib{,64} and /usr/local/lib{,64}
>> is likely not an "application in development" library (although
>> there are obvious exceptions to this heuristic).
>>
>> Another alternative: allow the user to "silence" specific
>> libraries via a glob pattern, e.g.
>>
>>   set system-library "/lib*/libc.so.6 /lib*/libpthread.so.1"
>>
>> The default could be "/lib* /usr/lib* /usr/local/lib*", which
>> would be equivalent to the heuristic above. A user who cares
>> about all libraries could reset this to "". A user who
>> doesn't care about any could set this to "*".
>
> I'd prefer the latter method.
>
>> [Use ';' instead of space to separate patterns on *win* targets.]
>
> Yes, and Windows needs a different default for the system libraries.

There's nothing in 'set system-library foo' that says it's for
suppressing "no debugging symbols found" messages.  I can imagine
someone down the road finding another use for wanting to know what the
system libraries are considered to be, but using "set system-library"
will mess with the "no debugging" suppression.  One could add an
additional option, set print system-library-symbol-loading on|off" (or
some such) akin to the current "set print symbol-loading on|off", or
change the latter to "set print symbol-loading off|normal|all" (or
some such, I didn't spend any time here thinking of good names :-)).
[The option was added after 6.8 so we should be able to change it
before the next release.]

Having to specify what the system library paths are is another
configuration parameter for ports, and if it's just used to suppress
"no debugging symbols found", I wonder if it's worth it though.