[Patch] was: MIPS assembler no longer "combines symbols in different segments"...

[Maciej W. Rozycki]

On Mon, 28 Feb 2005, Dave Korn wrote:

>   I agree with this:  it's an ABI-breaking change to suddenly remove support
> for a reloc type.  It may be desirable for more modern versions of the

 It's not a breaking change -- the relocation has never been a part of the
Linux ABI.  It has simply been abused.  If you use an undocumented
feature, you shouldn't be surprised if that feature disappears one day,
sorry.

> toolchain to deprecate, warn about, or simply no longer generate any given
> reloc, but some people have legacy compiled .o files that they'd still like
> to be linkable, and just because we don't want to generate it for new code
> doesn't mean we have to break the old code out there that already uses it.

 Old .o files still work and will work for the foreseeable future as BFD 
still supports these relocations and it's not going to be changed -- have 
you actually looked at the comment I've referred to.  It's gas support 
that we discuss and that means it only affects source code.

  Maciej