[PATCH] bfd function for chasing .gnu_debuglink

[graydon hoare <graydon at redhat dot com>]

Hi,

A change recently entered GDB to support "separate debug info". This
permits shipment and installation of smaller, stripped binaries, with
secondary packages (on secondary media) to support users who care about
debugging symbols. This trick is accomplished by embedding a filename
and checksum in a special ".gnu_debuglink" section of an object, which
specifies another object containing *only* the debug symbols for the
first. GDB then merges these symbols, as though they were present in the
initial object. 

It has become clear recently that GDB is not the only program which
would benefit from these separate packages; notably objdump and the
oprofile post-processing tools require access to them. Rather than
duplicate the same section-extracting, path-searching and
checksum-matching code in these tools, it was suggested that we
centralize the feature in binutils itself. 

Attached it a patch to BFD which adds such a function. The comments give
a pretty clear overview of its use. Configury also needs to be rebuilt,
of course.

Any BFD maintainers interested in pulling this in?

-graydon

Attachment: binutils-2.13.90.0.4-debuglink.patch
Description: Text document