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From: "Ivan Warren" <ivan AT vmfacility DOT fr>
To: <cygwin AT cygwin DOT com>
Subject: RE: getopt: ugly linker messages
Date: Sat, 20 Sep 2003 22:51:43 +0200
Message-ID: <000001c37fb8$ffc47140$0100000a@PCHOMEISW>
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> 
> Bingo.  Apparently, no one knows the answer to your question 
> and, apparently, no one is interested in researching the 
> problem for you. Also, as you noted, it has a trivially easy 
> workaround -- don't strip import libraries.

Right..

- No one is interrested in researching the problem for me.. Now..
WAITAMINUTE ! I spent the entire week trying to find how I could document
this the best I could so that the entire community may benefit from it.
Because I am no ld/strip/binutils wiz doesn't mean I don't make any research
in the problems I run into. I documented and made an entirelly self
contained test case which demonstrates the problem. This is what *YOU* ask
from other people reporting problems (and it does make sense). I tried to
make it as easy as possible for you & your team to determine if this was
something that involved your portion of the software or not.

- I don't strip the libraries. Libtool does it. If you want an
autoconf/automake/libtool case which demonstrates this, I could do it.. But
to what avail ? As no-one is interrested in looking into a reported problem
(for which I may not be the only one affected.). The test case has a strip
in it because it is a TEST CASE ! The fix cannot be a to patch libtool to
workaround a flaw in the cygwin binutils implementation (I have all the
reasons to believe --strip-unneeded should work on import libraries..), that
would be a Bad Thing (tm)..

> 
> "Wah! No one is paying attention to me!" rants don't really 
> help your case, much.  Nor does sending messages to threads 
> which have little to do with your problem.

The thread as something to do with the problem. It exhibits somewhat
identical symptoms and it involves the same line of tools. The 'auto-import'
of .data and/or .bss defined sections is involved. It's not 'getopt' which
is the concern, it's the linker issuing 'ugly' messages - I just pushed it a
bit further and wanted people looking at what happened when you do push it
further.

However, getopt is ALSO involved. example would be if you build a project
which has only very little code in the executable but the rest of it in a
DLL/shared library. If the 'getopt' is invoked from that DLL, the program
will either not link ot crash at run time (provided you let libtool strip
the libraries).

As to the rant, it DID help : at least, I did get a response. The response
is Off Topic, but at least, it's a response.

> 
> As far as your specific question on who to bug, yes, 
> obviously, this is a binutils problem.

Thank for spending a little bit of effort informing me. I will not waste
more of your precious time. Hopefully, I'll get a better response from the
binutils folks who may find a solution to an issue that DOES affect cygwin
(and any other environment using the PE 386 object format).

--Ivan


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