[OE-core] [PATCH 00/29] Add gobject introspection support to oe-core

[Mark Hatle]

On 11/10/15 5:40 PM, Burton, Ross wrote:
> 
> On 10 November 2015 at 23:10, Phil Blundell <pb at pbcl.net <mailto:pb at pbcl.net>>
> wrote:
> 
>     Why does gobject-introspection (presumably giscanner, right?) need to
>     run binaries on the target at all?  I thought it operated mostly on the
>     source code.
> 
> 
> Same reason gtk-doc's scanner executes code: vast amounts of relevant
> information can't reliably be extracted from source but is trivial to introspect
> at runtime (GObject hierarchy, properties, signals, etc).

I wonder if any of this could be 'discovered' via objdump or readelf.

In the past we did something like this by setting 'return' values as strings in
a program.  We let the compiler optimize the settings (ensuring only the real
value was retained) and then used objdump to read the string out of the binary.
 It worked really well for this type of thing.

Problem of course is when the binary is not self sufficient and requires others
to be linked so the optimization is not possible.

--Mark

> Ross