Date: Tue, 27 Aug 1996 10:24:52 +0200 (METDST)
From: Robert Hoehne <robert DOT hoehne AT mathematik DOT tu-chemnitz DOT de>
To: DJGPP workers <djgpp-workers AT delorie DOT com>
Subject: Re: Binutils 2.7 + djgpp.lnk
In-Reply-To: <s222b75d.033@MAIL.TAIT.CO.NZ>
Message-Id: <Pine.HPP.3.91.960827094350.14530B-100000@newton.mathematik.tu-chemnitz.de>
Mime-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: TEXT/PLAIN; charset=US-ASCII

On Tue, 27 Aug 1996, Bill Currie wrote:

> I disagree.  I would much prefer to be able to produce a raw coff file without
> producing an exe file.  I think Robert's suggestion of 'go32stubbed-coff' is
> suitable.  If it realy is too long, make it 'go32stub-coff' or 'djstub-coff'.
>

Yesterday I thought about and tested the problem and found the following:

It is not possible to build only one target in the BFD-library. The problem
is, that in this case the assembler would also produce exe-object files,
and this is not what we want. Or has some body an idea, how the 
BFD-library can check when the BFD-object is created (yes at this point, and
not later), if the object should be stubbed or not? This is needed, because
BFD computes all filepointers in the object file depending on the header
information.

I have now decided, to call the new target 'coff-go32-exe' and make the
target 'coff-go32' to the default (see problems with as above).

To the default behaviour of ld: I think, this must be done with the specs.
There can be added a switch '--oformat coff-go32-exe' and the output will
be an exe file. But this will also produce an exe file, even the user has
specified an output file without the exe suffix. Though there is a new
switch for ld, called '--force-exe-suffix', but this does not work yet,
it produces a message 'could not close foo.exe', if it is called with
'-o foo'.

As a result of the above problems, I think it is betther, to leave the
settings in the specs file, as they are and produce the exe file with
stubify. (or is there a trick in the specs to check, if the user has
specified the exe suffix on the output file and adding the needed
output target switch to ld depending on this?)


Now to the djgpp.lnk file: Must we include, when building ld, the emulation
file? All the settings in that file are bypassed, when we define the
'-Tdjgpp.lnk' switch when linking. I ask this, because the building of
the emulation file from the scripts is a very hard thing under DOS, I
did it under Linux. Or should I update the scripts in that file to the
current settings in djgpp.lnk and so we don't need the -T switch, except
we need other settings than defined in the emulation.

And now the last comments of me:
As DJ me mailed, I asked at fsf AT gnu DOT ai DOT mit DOT edu to give me instructions
about how and where to upload patches about the changes to GDB 4.16. But
I got no answer until now. I had this problem already many times ago,
as I wrote something else to them. Maybe I'm too unknown to them, so they
don't answer me.

Robert