| Fundamental design decision: |
| |
| - the sizes of external and internal types are assumed to be the same. |
| This leaves byte ordering aside. While assuming this the code can be |
| greatly simplified and speed increases. Since no change violating this |
| assumption is in sight this is believed to be a worthwhile optimization. |
| |
| - the ABI of the backend modules is not guaranteed. Really, no guarantee |
| whatsoever. We are enforcing this in the code. The modules and their |
| users must match. No third-party EBL module are supported or allowed. |
| The only reason there are separate modules is to not have the code for |
| all architectures in all the binaries. |
| |
| - although the public libraries (libasm, libdw) have a stable API and are |
| backwards ABI compatible they, and the elfutils tools, do depend on each |
| others internals, and on internals of libelf to provide their interfaces. |
| So they should always be upgraded in lockstep when packaging the tools |
| and libraries separately. For one example of how to do that, see the |
| config/elfutils.spec. |
