svn commit: r350505 - in head: contrib/binutils/binutils/doc gnu/usr.bin/binutils/objdump

[Ed Maste]

On Thu, 1 Aug 2019 at 12:35, Ian Lepore <ian at freebsd.org> wrote:
>
> Why would we provide no objdump?  I use it quite frequently; it seems
> like an essential part of the toolchain to me.

I don't want us to provide no objdump, but providing GNU objdump
2.17.50 indefinitely is not a viable option; see PR 218387[1] for an
example of the kind of issue we have with providing obsolete software.

We have a choice of:
1. provide llvm-objdump, and no /usr/bin/objdump in the base system
2. install llvm-objdump as /usr/bin/objdump
3. require that users who want an objdump install the binutils port

/usr/bin/objdump is not required by the base system build and not
required by most ports. exp-run details with no /usr/bin/objdump can
be found in PR 212319[2], and PR 229046[3] is a tracking PR for
removing dependencies on objdump.

Option 1 (removing /usr/bin/objdump) is proposed in review D7338[4]
while option 2 is (installing llvm-objdump as objdump) is proposed in
review D18307. llvm-objdump is roughly compatible with GNU objdump
(command line and output format) but there are a large number of small
issues that will likely trip up scripted or automated objdump use.
(Scripts should probably just use readelf instead, though.) D18307 has
a list of LLVM bug reports for known issues in llvm-objdump.

Note also that we currently provide only two or three obsolete
binutils, depending on the CPU architecture:
- as
- ld
- objdump

[1] https://bugs.freebsd.org/218387
[2] https://bugs.freebsd.org/212319
[3] https://bugs.freebsd.org/229046
[4] https://reviews.freebsd.org/D7338
[5] https://reviews.freebsd.org/D18307