Re: Safely ignore make check

[Roland McGrath <roland at redhat dot com>]

The elflint-self tests check the lintiness of the binaries just built.
Unlike the other tests, these are not really just self-tests for
elfutils, because they are not done on known data.  So these errors
aren't telling you anything about the state of the elfutils build (it's
working fine).  They are telling you about dubious things that your
build environment is producing by default.

Miscellaneous elflint errors usually indicate some bugs in the compiler
or linker, which there have been in older versions of the tools.

From these particular errors, I suspect your tools are not using
-msecure-plt, which is the new norm for ppc32 compiler configurations,
at least in some distributions.  That is now a backward way to be and
not recommended, so you may want to look into that on your system.
But deciding to change that or not doesn't really have anything to do
with making elfutils work well.  (So you could just ignore these errors.)

Still, I think elflint should cope with the old norm for ppc32 binaries
too.  I think there is some tag somewhere by which we can distinguish
old binaries from new ones so as to check thoroughly but not produce
these extra messages for old binaries.  Can you send me some of your
binaries to examine?  Send one executable and one DSO from those that
elflint complained about.  (You can put them somewhere for download,
or mail them to me privately, not to spam the list with huge attachments.)


Thanks,
Roland