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Re: gold patch committed: Skip incompatible objects
On Mon, 16 Mar 2009, Ian Lance Taylor wrote:
Michael Hennebry <hennebry@web.cs.ndsu.nodak.edu> writes:
On Fri, 13 Mar 2009, Ian Lance Taylor wrote:
When the GNU linker searches for an input file or an archive, if it
finds an incompatible file, it skips it and keeps searching. An object
is incompatible if it is built for a target other than the one being
linked. An archive is incompatible if it contains an incompatible
object. A script is incompatible if it uses an OUTPUT_FORMAT command to
name a target other than the one being linked. The GNU linker issues a
warning when it skips a file, unless --no-warn-search-mismatch is used.
IIRC linkers generally and GNU's in particular
*quietly* skip -L directories they can't find.
Usually that isn't too bad.
Sometimes it's the reason a failure to link is mysterious to me.
It would be nice if, at least in the case of a failure to link,
a failure to find a directory became noisy.
It seems a little bit peculiar to me to go back and warn only after
reporting some other error. ...
Hindsight is 20/20.
Red smears seem more significant after one
has discovered a deathly pale corpse.
... The only time that an incorrect -L option
would be a problem in this way would be if you have multiple libraries
with the same name, and you are picking up the wrong one because a -L
option was missed. That does not seem like a common case to me.
Or I don't pick up either and it fails to link.
There are only two missing symbols, so I suspect API version mismatch.
After a week or two of wild goose-chasing, I discover one rather small
archive sitting all alone in the one directory that wasn't spelled correctly.
If the linker finds a deathly pale corpse (unlinkable files),
it would be nice if it told me about the red smears
(non-existant directories) it noticed earlier.
I wouldn't object to optionally warning about missing -L directories,
but I don't think it should be the default behaviour, and I doubt I will
bother to write such a patch myself.
Perhaps it could be implied by --verbose.
--
Michael hennebry@web.cs.ndsu.NoDak.edu
"Pessimist: The glass is half empty.
Optimist: The glass is half full.
Engineer: The glass is twice as big as it needs to be."