#544 formatting difference between ELF Tool Chain and binutils readelf

[Ed Maste]

As reported in FreeBSD PR 216878 readelf -d puts parentheses around the tag constants (- is binutils, + is ELF Tool Chain):

- 0x0000000000000001 (NEEDED)             Shared library: [libc++.so.1]
+ 0x0000000000000001 NEEDED               Shared library: [libc++.so.1]

There might be other formatting differences vs binutils. We should note the differences in the man page, or match binutils format exactly. In this case I think the parentheses in binutils are not useful and occupy columns that would be better used to avoid truncating long DT_* names, but if it turns out there's a lot of scripts/software that parses readelf output and expects the GNU format it's not worth being different.

Also note that elfutils eu-readelf does not include parentheses:

% eu-readelf -d /bin/ls

Dynamic segment contains 28 entries:
 Addr: 0x0000000000607028  Offset: 0x007028  Link to section: [ 6] '.dynstr'
  Type              Value
  NEEDED            Shared library: [libutil.so.9]
  NEEDED            Shared library: [libncurses.so.8]
  NEEDED            Shared library: [libc.so.7]
  INIT              0x00000000004018c8
  FINI              0x0000000000405dd8
...

so there's some argument that scripts parsing readelf output should be tolerant of different formats, looking for just NEEDED