Hi David,
What is the status of STABS support?
Essentially it is in maintenance mode. But this is due to lack of developers interested in extending STABS support, rather than a policy of maintenance-only.
Are there any plans to deprecate STABS support?
No, none.
If STABS enhancements were made and posted would they be frowned upon? Or would they be reviewed for possible inclusion in a future release?
No, they would be reviewed and, assuming that they are suitable, they would be accepted for inclusion in future releases.
Switching to DWARF causes our build products directory (which contains *NONE* of the intermediate files) to swell from 1.2 GB to 11.5 GB. Ouch! The DWARF ELF files are 8-12 times the size of the STABS ELF files. If the DWARF files were, say, a factor of 2 the size of the STABS files, I could probably sell people on switching to DWARF; but, a factor of 8 to 12 is too much.
Have you tried using a DWARF compression tool like dwz ? http://gcc.gnu.org/ml/gcc/2012-04/msg00686.html Or maybe the --compress-debug-sections option to objcopy ? Cheers Nick
