Re: global vars and symbol visibility for mips32/elf

[Richard Stallman <rms@gnu.ai.mit.edu>]

    > So did you report the bugs, and your fixes, a year ago?  You could
    > have enabled the bug to have been fixed in the GNU sources a year ago,
    > too.

    The nonstandard behaviout in GCC is deliberate.  See the comment in
    varasm.c line 1092:

Yes, THAT is deliberate.  Indeed, there would have been no need to
report that fact about GCC.  But I thought you were talking of fixes
in ld.  Is that not so?

    While for the linker, we use a variant of the Linux linker distributed
    of H.J.Lu, which is a somehow modified GNU ld. There again somebody did 
    the work and put in warning messages for the case that commons were
    linked against library functions.  Again, this person obviously knew
    what the problem was and deliberately decided to issue a warning instead
    of preventing the symbol to match.

These are the sort of changes I thought we were talking about.  Who is
it who made these changes and didn't send them or report the problem?

    I am quite surprised to find that everybody thinks that GCC and LD
    should be changed.  We modified them for our Linux distributions because
    we wanted strict C standard and POSIX conformance.  But the standard
    conformant behaviour can also break many programs which rely on COMMONS. 

I think you're talking about two different changes as if they were
one.  We need to keep the distinction clear.  We DO NOT want to make
-fno-common the default.  We DO want to fix LD so it does the right
thing when common symbols are used.