[PATCH v2 00/16] PR ld/24600: Add general linker support for mapless archives

[Fangrui Song]

On Mon, Nov 17, 2025 at 7:17 AM Maciej W. Rozycki <macro@redhat.com> wrote:
>
> [...]
> Therefore please hold on your temptation to review
> these changes for the time being.
>
>   Maciej
>

If you send an updated series, I hope the --link-mapless option can be
renamed to avoid confusion with -M/-Map :)

I believe the option length doesn't really matter as it would not be
used often - and at some point will become legacy

>      -M /-M      --print-map       Print a link map to the standard output.
>       -Map=mapfile /-Map             Print a link map to the file mapfile.

> https://inbox.sourceware.org/binutils/a1c5693a-2943-ecb6-030c-ae59a5f3e59b@redhat.com/#t
> On Sat, 27 Sep 2025, Fangrui Song wrote:
>
>> Regarding the option name, what do you think of
>> --[no-]allow-unindexed-archives instead of --link-mapless?
>> --link-mapless might be confusing since it looks similar to the "link
>> map" (-M, --Map), even though the functionality (related to archive
>> index or archive symbol table) is completely different.
>
> Thank you for the suggestion.  With my decades long *nix background I'm not very keen on exceedingly long option names to be honest.  I'd have to chew it over or I'll be happy to collect other people's opinions.

>> I believe --allow-unindexed-archives will primarily be needed during
>> the transition period as the ecosystem adopts symbol-table-less
>> archives.

> I envisage no need for this option for the vast majority of users as it is on by default anyway.  I chose to include it primarily for the negated form, for people who might want to catch any archive carrying no symbol map by accident in their build system, as such archives necessarily have a link performance implication.  And once you have the negated form you need the straight one as well, for completeness.