gold patch committed: Skip incompatible objects
Ian Lance Taylor
iant@google.com
Mon Mar 16 17:44:00 GMT 2009
Michael Hennebry <hennebry@web.cs.ndsu.nodak.edu> writes:
> On Fri, 13 Mar 2009, Ian Lance Taylor wrote:
>
>> When the GNU linker searches for an input file or an archive, if it
>> finds an incompatible file, it skips it and keeps searching. An object
>> is incompatible if it is built for a target other than the one being
>> linked. An archive is incompatible if it contains an incompatible
>> object. A script is incompatible if it uses an OUTPUT_FORMAT command to
>> name a target other than the one being linked. The GNU linker issues a
>> warning when it skips a file, unless --no-warn-search-mismatch is used.
>
> IIRC linkers generally and GNU's in particular
> *quietly* skip -L directories they can't find.
> Usually that isn't too bad.
> Sometimes it's the reason a failure to link is mysterious to me.
> It would be nice if, at least in the case of a failure to link,
> a failure to find a directory became noisy.
It seems a little bit peculiar to me to go back and warn only after
reporting some other error. The only time that an incorrect -L option
would be a problem in this way would be if you have multiple libraries
with the same name, and you are picking up the wrong one because a -L
option was missed. That does not seem like a common case to me.
I wouldn't object to optionally warning about missing -L directories,
but I don't think it should be the default behaviour, and I doubt I will
bother to write such a patch myself.
Ian
More information about the Binutils
mailing list