1
2On 4 Apr 06, the debuginfo reader (m_debuginfo) was majorly cleaned up
3and restructured.  It has been a bit of a tangle for a while.  On 18 Sep 14
4the STABS support was completely removed. The new structure looks like this:
5
6                  debuginfo.c
7
8                   readelf.c
9
10                  readdwarf.c
11
12                   storage.c
13
14Each .c can only call those below it on the page.
15
16storage.c contains the SegInfo structure and stuff for
17maintaining/searching arrays of symbols, line-numbers, and Dwarf CF
18info records.
19
20readdwarf.c parses the relevant kind of info and call storage.c to
21store the results.
22
23readelf.c reads ELF format, hands syms directly to storage.c,
24then delegates to readdwarf.c for debug info.  All straightforward.
25
26debuginfo.c is the top-level file, and is quite small.
27
28There are 2 goals to this:
29
30(1) Generally tidy up something which needs tidying up
31
32(2) Introduce more modularity, so as to make it easier to add
33    readers for other formats, if needed
34
35Rationale for (1) and (2) are obvious.
36
37Originally there was also goal (3) Simplify the stabs reader.
38But stabs support was broken since 3.9.0 and completely removed in 3.10.0.
39
40The worst thing is that it is the stabs type reader that was crashing,
41not the stabs line-number reader.
42Old versions of the stabs type reader can be found in the subversion repository
43as m_debuginfo/UNUSED_STABS.txt, the stabs line-number reader was in
44m_debuginfo/readstabs.c. The old version of this file explained more
45about the setup.
46