Question about toolchain and objdump's output on ia64/mips/mipsel

[Raphael Hertzog <hertzog@debian.org>]

Hello,

while working on http://wiki.debian.org/Projects/ImprovedDpkgShlibdeps
I'm discovering some arch-specific differences in the "objdump -T"
output of libraries.

* On ia64, static functions appear in objdump's output and they are marked
  as "local".
  See my previous message to debian-ia64:
  http://lists.debian.org/debian-ia64/2007/08/msg00000.html

* On ia64, mips and mipsel, functions with gcc's visibility attribute
  hidden also appear in objdump's output and they are marked as "local".
  Example with libglib2.0:
000386a8 l    DF .text  00000020  Base        .hidden IA__g_list_free


I have two questions:

* are those behaviour expected on those arches or are they bugs in the
  respective toolchains?

* can I consider (in general and not only for those architectures) all
  those symbols marked as "local" as unusable by applications linked to
  those libraries?
  (my interest is to strip them from the symbols file if they are
  effectively useless so that the symbols file are the same across all our
  architectures when there's no significant underlying difference)

Thanks in advance for your help.
-- 
Raphaël Hertzog

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