[llvm-dev] RFC: llvm-readelf Mach-O & COFF options

[James Henderson via llvm-dev]

llvm-readobj is fine as is, and as far as I know, there's no issue with it
needing to be GNU compatible. llvm-readelf on the other hand should be,
based on various discussions over the last couple of years. I'm not
proposing removing the Mach-O and COFF options from llvm-readobj at all. I
think it makes sense to keep them where they are. What I'm suggesting is
removing them from the options in llvm-readelf ONLY (detected by the name
of the executable, similar to how we already decide what aliases to
support). Ideally, I'd expect these options to still be available in
llvm-readelf, and they'd do exactly the same as what llvm-readobj does,
just that they wouldn't be printed by llvm-readelf --help.

To reiterate, this proposal does not affect the behaviour of the
llvm-readobj executable, unless it has been renamed to llvm-readelf. Does
that make sense?

James

On Thu, 27 Jun 2019 at 19:43, Reid Kleckner <rnk at google.com> wrote:

> My perspective is that llvm-readobj is a testing tool whose goal should be
> to make testing LLVM easy, not 100% GNU readelf compatibility, but I think
> that ship has sailed.
>
> I don't really care if you decide to move the functionality, I just want
> to have some binary in LLVM for exploratory dumpers, where I don't have to
> care too much about consistency with another tool that makes different
> arbitrary formatting decisions. So, if you want to move it, I guess we need
> some new binary where we can put experimental code. "llvm-objutil"
> mirroring llvm-pdbutil?
>
> On Thu, Jun 27, 2019 at 3:03 AM James Henderson via llvm-dev <
> llvm-dev at lists.llvm.org> wrote:
>
>> Hi all,
>>
>> llvm-readelf is an alias for llvm-readobj which aims for GNU
>> compatibility and is likely the tool that most people migrating to the LLVM
>> binutils will adopt instead of llvm-readobj. Because it is just an alias,
>> it has inherited the functionality provided by llvm-readobj, including for
>> non-ELF targets, with Mach-O and COFF-specific switches available in its
>> interface. People migrating from GNU readelf won't need these switches.
>>
>> I have a change up for review to expand the documentation for
>> llvm-readelf to list all its supported switches (see
>> https://reviews.llvm.org/D63826). This patch currently includes the
>> Mach-O and COFF specific switches. It was suggested that these could be
>> surprising and unnecessary, and could be removed from the patch. If we go
>> ahead and remove them from the documentation, I think we should remove them
>> from the help text, or possibly even the available options entirely. I'd be
>> happy to do the work for this, if the community agrees that llvm-readelf
>> should only support ELF-related options.
>>
>> Thoughts?
>>
>> James
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>> llvm-dev at lists.llvm.org
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>>
>
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