Re: Binutuls is broken now.

[DJ Delorie <dj at delorie dot com>]

> The existing behaviour (before my patch) was broken for reasons
> I explained when that patch was submitted, briefly as above.
> 
> I do believe objcopy can be used in the Linux kernel example you
> gave.  It seems cleaner than letting ld do the format
> conversion, but that might be a matter of taste.
> 
> Nevertheless, changed behaviour is changed behaviour.  I think
> we can afford to wait for head-maintainers opinions.  Right?

Stepping in in the middle here...

IMHO, changing ld to no longer allow linking a chunk of binary data
would be a Bad Thing.  If there are cases with mixed object formats
that are broken, disabling those is acceptable if you cannot fix them.
This case was not broken and should not be disabled (I've used it
myself many times).  This functionality is now about seven years old,
and removing it because we think it's cleaner without it isn't a valid
justification.

So, if we can allow binary without allowing other mixed-formats, that
would be good.  Better would be to fix bfd so that mixed formats works
correctly whenever possible, and fail only if a specific case is
detected that cannot be handled (rather than reject them
categorically).