Bug#869868: Diffoscope should be much more flexible with respects to the ELF tools it uses

[Daniel Egger]

Hi Chris,

> Can you give me an example? eg. Where are these binaries located, etc.
> etc. or are they in such bespoke dirs that the ability to override
> externally is required?

The issue here is: the tools are architecture dependent, for ARM binaries you'll need tools compiled with ARM support, e.g. https://packages.debian.org/buster/amd64/binutils-arm-none-eabi/filelist . They often live right next to the regular tools but are prefixed with the architecture triplet, but there're also custom toolchains which have the same triplet prefix but live in a custom prefix like /opt. The one without the triplet prefixed is in many cases only capable of handling the native and compatible architectures, so trying to use that on an ARM binary will not work.

Preferably diffoscope would look at the ELF binary and automagically try to use the correct binutils for processing but for the start I'd be happy if I could just tell it which tool to use rather than resorting to extreme measures like manipulating the binary search path or linking the desired binary over the generic name in a preferred binary path and then back again.

Servus,
      Daniel