Re: BUG elf32-i386 R_386_PC32 done wrong

[doctor electron]

Long, long ago, Eric Botcazou, a life form in far off space,
emitted:

>neither you nor us can change it now

Thanks for your further thoughts -- and even bigger story!

The answer to that is pending; I hope we can edit ld to not
require -4 in those rel reloc locations in input files.

If so, the market will decide; is a corrected ld favored or not.

>but you are 20 years late

That's the marvel.  Why was this not corrected 20 years ago?
IMHO, it is never too late to upgrade quality -- and my proposed
correction would have a practical effect: (1) you could announce
to compiler makers they don't need the -4 gibberish in the
object file outputs anymore (and they could optionally remove
that from their compilers) and (2) a huge resource of countless
object files in the outside world of computing would be linkable
on Linux.

And you wouldn't even have to edit your ABI document.  With a
fixed ld, compiler makers could put the -4's as before or 0
instead or even random numbers in those locations.

Are you saying, "Linux cannot be improved?"  Seems so.  IMHO,
not good public relations re promoting the OS.

Only problem may be: while you are free to nurture a "We are
defeated" attitude, there is, oops, nothing to prevent others
from doing the obvious improvements -- especially when it comes
to the OS's flag-ship linker.

Take care, Jim