A very "strange" bug in gcc 2.96

[Ian Lance Taylor]

   From: Ulrich Drepper <drepper@redhat.com>
   Date: 21 May 2000 13:33:13 -0700

   Ian Lance Taylor <ian@zembu.com> writes:

   > It's not broken to build a shared library with an object compiled
   > without -fPIC.  It is often a convenience, when a single object is
   > used in multiple ways.

   This is still broken.  There is absolutely no reason why the build
   process could not be fixed.  You are only giving stupid and lazy
   programmers an excuse to not fix their code.

People don't always have sources for their objects, so fixing the code
is not always an option.

   There are platforms where it is really absolutely necessary to use
   -fPIC is you are building a DSO and requiring this on more platforms
   just increases portability.

What platforms are those?  (The MIPS requires PIC if you want to any
dynamic linking at all, but I'm not aware of any platform which
requires PIC for shared objects and only for shared objects.)

Ian