Talk:Binary File Descriptor library

Call for help Core Dump

I have described my issue in the talk about it Talk:Core_dump. Basically, I am dealing with people who are repeatedly deleting the content of this node. Need more free and open source people to come and help me out!!!

User:Mdupont 21:40 30 Oct. 2006 (CET)

GPL, so what?

"[BFD's] licensing under the GPL [...] has tended to limit its use; [...]"

Please explain why. I understand the differences between licensing a library under GPL vs. LGPL, with an LGPL-licensed library having the advantage to link it against proprietary code legally. But I don't see a problem with licensing BFD with GPL, as it seems to me that BFD is a inhouse development-only related library that does not need to be incorporated into a publicized software product. Thanks, --Abdull (talk) 08:39, 17 December 2009 (UTC)

The statement should probably be whacked. Although are probably non-free or BSD-licensed programs that are having to provide their own object file manipulation when they would rather be using BFD, I can't think of any actual examples. BFD *could* be maintained as a generic system library a la curses and such, but the API would be very complicated and need continual revision to keep up with the arcana of different systems. There is a bit of chicken-and-egg going on, since potential clients are discouraged by the messy API, but API cleanup would take time away from meeting the needs of the current clients. Stan (talk) 13:46, 17 December 2009 (UTC)

Sounds good. Whacking the statement (after adding references to the changing ABI discouraging its use) —Hobart (talk) 19:33, 3 April 2011 (UTC)

Notability

Without the BFD library, nearly all development in the Linux world comes to a screeching sudden halt; even so, it may not be notable. :-) Ironically, despite its linchpin status, it's not described in books much - Tiemann in Open Sources retells the naming story and mentions BFD's importance to GNU's spread, but there's not much else in print. Everybody just uses it without realizing its significance I guess. Stan (talk) 20:18, 29 July 2011 (UTC)

I believe the BFD library is extremely notable, for the reasons given by Stan Shebs above. Not only the Linux world, but pretty much the entire Internet would grind to a halt without the software that relies on the BFD library. As an educator and a software developer, I assert that future generations are in danger of losing the ability to maintain our technological infrastructure if such vital and fundamental components like the BFD library are not widely and extensively documented. Please DO NOT remove this page! Willkn (talk) 13:57, 20 October 2012 (UTC)

Interestingly, while looking for prints that could confirm the notability I discovered the "Handbook of Open Source Tools" book (2010) which uses the exact sentence from the 2008 version of wikipedia article.

The BFD, or Binary File Descriptor library, is the GNU Project's main mechanism for the portable manipulation of object files in a variety of formats.

Not sure if this book could be now used as a reference for this article. Salmin (talk) 18:21, 22 March 2015 (UTC)

These links could be used to improve the article

• libbfd - an 2003 article (initial version in 1991) by Steve Chamberlain of Cygnus Support
• Security Warrior - a 2004 book that provides BFD usage examples and some background
• BFD Internals - development document

Salmin (talk) 18:55, 22 March 2015 (UTC)

Section order

I moved the history section to the beginning because it seemed like it was more encyclopedic. Leefkrust22 (talk) 07:14, 25 December 2011 (UTC)

Can we remove the template?

Can we remove the template? Wikieditor 2027 (talk) 11:41, 12 July 2023 (UTC)