Re: [Patch] was: MIPS assembler no longer "combines symbols in differentsegments"...

[David Daney <ddaney at avtrex dot com>]

Maciej W. Rozycki wrote:
> On Mon, 28 Feb 2005, David Daney wrote:
>
>
> > > It's not a breaking change -- the relocation has never been a part of the
> > > Linux ABI.  It has simply been abused.  If you use an undocumented
> > > feature, you shouldn't be surprised if that feature disappears one day,
> > > sorry.
> >
> > What do you consider a "breaking change"?  I don't care if it is part of some
> > official ABI document.  It is part of a de facto ABI that is used by GCC-3.3.x
>
>
>  It's a bug in GCC 3.3.  It has been fixed.  If you require 
> bug-compatibility, you may maintain it yourself either by fixing GCC 3.3 
> or by using your workaround.

I guess I will be maintaining my own private gas work around as it now 
appears quite unlikely that the patch or something similar will ever get 
into an official binutils release.

> > By removing this relocation, you cannot use binutils 2.16 with GCC-3.3.x.  In
> > a perfect world, Binutils 2.15 would have had a non-broken linker and we would
> > keep using it.  But we don't live in a perfect world.
>
>
>  In a perfect world GCC 3.3 wouldn't have had this bug.  Is backporting 
> the fix from GCC 3.4 impossible?

Most things of this nature are not impossible.  I think messing around 
with GCC is much more risky and much more work than my patch to gas.

I am just trying to obtain a working toolchain.  I prefer to use 
unpatched official releases of things whenever possible.  My patch 
submission was just an attempt to diverge a little less.

David Daney