Re: stripping symbols needed for relocations

[Nick Clifton <nickc at redhat dot com>]

Hi Jan,

> Wouldn't it make sense to prevent doing such (except when --strip-all)
> in the first place (binutils/objcopy.c, filter_symbols) rather than
> generating an error message (bfd/elf.c,
> _bfd_elf_symbol_from_bfd_symbol)? Or are there specific uses of doing so
> that would not result in such an error?

I think that the only case where it would not matter is if the 
relocation is in a section which is going to be discarded.  So to answer 
your first question, yes I think that filter_symbols() should try to 
preserve reloc-used symbols unless --strip-all or --strip-symbol is in 
effect.  Note that the code does already try to do this by looking for 
the BSF_KEEP flag.

Cheers
  Nick