libbacktrace is really useful and can be used by user programs perfectly. Please install the library by default. Currently: libbacktrace/Makefile.am: noinst_LTLIBRARIES = libbacktrace.la Gentoo won't install it on its own: https://bugs.gentoo.org/show_bug.cgi?id=552098 Debian already includes the library in in libgcc-4.8-dev and later (https://packages.debian.org/sid/amd64/libgcc-4.9-dev/filelist). We'd like to use libbacktrace for http://openage.sft.mx/ but because of this issue many distributors don't provide the probably best backtrace library.
The sigrok project at sigrok.org needs libbacktrace as well. This bug is almost 5 years old, is this ever going to happen? If there was a reason for intentionally not installing libbacktrace then maybe I would understand but as it stands, it seems like a strange decision to omit it from the install.
I personally am not going to make the decision as to whether GCC should install libbacktrace. That is up to the GCC release managers. Most projects that want to use libbacktrace separately from GCC are using the project github.com/ianlancetaylor/libbacktrace.
Thanks for your response, Ian. Do you know how the GCC release managers can be asked for their stance regarding this? I would assume that they're not CC'ed on this bug report and I'm not familiar enough with the GCC organization to know where to check. So far, I haven't seen a libbacktrace package on any of the distros that I checked, so my understanding of what you wrote is that an alternative way of using libbacktrace would be to integrate it into the build process of the program that wishes to use it and link it to the executable statically. Is this understanding correct?
Probably it makes sense to ask on gcc@gcc.gnu.org about whether libbacktrace should be installed when installing GCC. Yes, what you describe should work. Note that in the general case libbacktrace must be statically linked, though there are limited cases where it can work correctly when dynamically linked.