Re: [Patch] ld testsuite: Fix some FAILs caused by missing -fpic.

[David Daney <david dot daney at cavium dot com>]

On 12/07/2011 03:24 AM, nick clifton wrote:
> Hi David, Daney
>
> > > How old is "very old" ?
> >
> > GCC-4.2 and earlier.
>
> > > If "very old" actually includes any of the 4.x versions of gcc then I
> > > would be inclined to say that a better fix would be to check the gcc
> > > version number and only omit "-fpic" if it is not needed.
> >
> > That is too much work.
>
> No it's not.  See the attached patch for a suggestion of how to do this.

That patch looks fine to me, and since you are a Maintainer, I would 
encourage you to commit it if you are happy with it.

That said, I think it may be overkill as no sane person would be testing 
a modern mips binutils with a pre-2.95 GCC.


> > Although I haven't tested it, supplying -fpic
> > will not break anything in any GCC version I know about. I think
> > GCC-2.95 and later should be fine with this, certainly any GCC-4.x and
> > later compiler can handle -fpic.
>
> If passing -fpic to gcc was not a problem for the mips compiler then why
> were these special tests added to the linker test harness in the first
> place ?

I wasn't around when it was created.

Eric Christopher might know.

If neither you nor Eric know, then I think we have to live with the 
possibility that this information has been lost forever.

David Daney