Re: Why not a label for .debug_frame?

[Robert Lipe <robertlipe at usa dot net>]

Stan Shebs wrote:
> I've been looking into adopting Dwarf 2 for Darwin / Mac OS X, and
> as part of that, tried enabling -gdwarf-2 in GCC's Darwin port.

As a maintainer, you're unlikely to regret it. 

> However, I have a problem where the name of the section .debug_frame
> is used as a symbol (a "section symbol"), which is an ELFism not
> supported by the Mach-O assembler.  I'm a little loath to change

I'm not convinced it's an ELF-ism at all.  I think it's something that
just happens to be supported by GNU as.

> the assembler to create section symbols, and have been looking at
> how the .debug_frame symbol is used.  In the process I noticed that
> other sections such as .debug_info and .debug_abbrev have labels
> generated for them, and subsequent code refers to those labels
> rather than the sections.  (To help jog memories, the patch was
> from Robert Lipe for SVR5, and may be seen at
> http://gcc.gnu.org/ml/gcc-patches/1999-02n/msg00802.html.)
> 
> So my question is, why isn't .debug_frame handled this way too?
> Inertia perhaps?

I selfishly scratched only the rash that was affecting me.  I was in
code that was well above my head.  I beat it until submission so that my
target bootstrapped and the debugger worked at least trivially.  So I
made no promises that I took the moral high roads on that.   

RJL