How should the GNU linker treat weak references?

[Ulrich Drepper]

"H . J . Lu" <hjl@lucon.org> writes:

> But in Mark's case, it is crtbegin.o contains a weak reference to
> __register_frame_info_bases, which has a definition in the shared
> libgcc. Do we treat weak reference the same as undefined when dealing
> with DT_NEEDED?

There is no problem in this particular case.  Since the definition in
libgcc_s is seen the weak reference (weak or not) is fulfilled.  In
general, weak references are treated exactly like normal references in
ld with one exception: weak references for symbols from archives.
Making a decision here is not easy, argumentations for both sides are
valid and therefore I want to see a flag for ld to let the user
decide.  Solaris' ld has this.

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