MIPS, strip --only-keep-debug & an infinite loop

[Maciej W. Rozycki]

On Sat, 30 Apr 2005, Daniel Jacobowitz wrote:

> >  That makes sense.  And with readelf I can see the problem now -- 
> > ".MIPS.options" is left marked as SHT_MIPS_OPTIONS as opposed to 
> > SHT_NOBITS.  Since that section no longer contains anything relevant, it 
> > should be considered a bug.
> 
> Hmm... I'm not completely sure, but your explanation is definitely
> plausible.  But BFD does a lot of things based on section name.  Will
> it actually help if the section is SHT_NOBITS, if its name is still
> .MIPS.options?

 For MIPS/ELF the only place that seems to depend on names rather than the 
type is _bfd_mips_elf_fake_sections().  I can check how such a change 
would affect it.  As a last resort, given it's already considered a hack, 
another one could perhaps be added on top of it making these special 
sections lose their special type if SHT_NOBITS is already set and having 
no contents is unexpected and makes such a section useless.

  Maciej