ordinal linking for cygwin ld

[Robert Collins]

> -----Original Message-----
> From: Charles Wilson [mailto:cwilson@ece.gatech.edu] 
> Sent: Saturday, April 27, 2002 9:04 AM
> To: Robert Collins
> Cc: Ralf Habacker; Kde-Cygwin; Binutils; Cygwin-Apps
> Subject: Re: ordinal linking for cygwin ld
> 
> 
> Robert Collins wrote:
> 
> > 
> > The PE spec (as I read it) indicates that as long as a name is 
> > included (ie it's not link-only-by-ordinal) then ordinals 
> can change 
> > and nothing will break.
> > 
> > It's only when the only link information is the ordinal 
> that problems 
> > will appear.
> 
> 
> That's what I thought, too, until I got bit.  Check the 
> cygwin(-apps?) 
> ml archives during spring/summer 2000.  At the time, the 
> symptoms seemed 
> like a smoking gun: link by ordinal == link ONLY by ordinal.  OTOH, 
> binutils on cygwin was royally broken at the time, DJ was 
> transitioning 
> away from cygwin, Mumit had been gone for half a year or 
> more, and bit 
> rot was setting in.

Yup. I was part of that conversation too :}.
 
> Perhaps the problems that burned me then were due to broken 
> binutils/maintainerless cygwin-gcc, and it wasn't the smoking gun I 
> thought it was.

IIRC it was never conclusively identified.
 
> OTOH, if you've linked by ordinal, and then you strip symbols 
> -- are the 
> names of the imports still retained?

Search me. 

Rob (cygwin sortof-binutils
maintainer-it-would-help-if-I-knew-these-things).