[PATCH v5 03/12] BFD: Correct archive format determination for non-default link emulations

[Maciej W. Rozycki]

On Wed, 28 Jan 2026, Hans-Peter Nilsson wrote:

> > > Hmm, the parameters and the test-description don't look
> > > a.out-cris-specific.  What am I missing?
> > 
> >  The CRIS target is the only one nowadays that supports aout and non-aout 
> > formats both at a time, and the aout BFD backend is one that crashes when 
> > incorrectly chosen by the BFD linker to handle ELF archive members.  For 
> > completeness this test covers the opposite situation as well, though it 
> > doesn't cause a crash, but hits PR binutils/33485 instead.  Yeah, corner 
> > cases and bitrot...
> 
> Sounds like great material for a comment above the xfail.

 Well, the crash has been fixed with this very change and much of this 
refers to the whole of this test script, so in v6 I'll add this at the 
top, right after the copyright stuff:

# The CRIS target is the only one nowadays that supports aout and
# non-aout formats both at a time, and the aout BFD backend is one
# that used to crash when incorrectly chosen by the BFD linker to
# handle ELF archive members despite the ELF emulation explicitly
# requested.
#
# For completeness this test covers the opposite situation as well
# (except for Linux targets, which don't support linker emulation
# switching), although it used not to cause a crash, but hits PR
# binutils/33485 instead.  Yeah, corner cases and bitrot...

I'll yet wait for further feedback though as I think respinning the whole 
series just for this comment (and the minor commit description fix) would 
be wasting everyone's bandwidth.

  Maciej