Re: treatment of operands to .file/.appfile

[Nick Clifton <nickc at redhat dot com>]

Hi Jan,

[Sorry for not replying to this email sooner].

> I'd like to come to an agreement on how gas should deal with this; 
> as I stated in the PR I think file names should not be altered
> independent of the target.

I agree with you on this.

But, I also agree with Ian when he says:

: My point is that symbols like the STT_FILE symbol or STT_SECTION
: symbols do not need to have a name.  It is not a bug to have a
: symbol with no name.  The macro tc_canonicalize_symbol_name
: applies to all symbols.  That macro should not reject symbols
: with no name.

I actually think that the right answer is to modify 
tc_canonicalize_symbol_name so that it is given a context for the 
symbol.  You said:

> Alternatively, tc_canonicalize_symbol_name could be given a way
> to know it's dealing with a file name, so as to allowing it to
> decide whether do do anything special here, but I don't think
> that'd be the right solution; after all, file names only depend
> on file system conventions, not on processor architecture

Which is precisely why I think that tc_canonicalize_symbol_name should 
be given an extra parameter, one which says "this symbol should be made 
to be valid in a host-system context" or "this symbol should be made to 
be valid in a target-architecture context".  [This could be extended to 
other contexts if necessary].

Cheers
  Nick