[Bug gold/10238] Gold linker does not resolve symbols using indirect dependencies

[apratt at us dot ibm dot com]

------- Additional Comments From apratt at us dot ibm dot com  2009-06-04 17:04 
-------
I had understood that gold was to be a drop-in replacement for the system
linkers on the platforms it supports, accepting the same inputs and performing
valid (though much faster) links on them. I reported this issue because I came
across it "in the wild": a link line that works with the host linker but not
with gold, a classic case of incompatibility.

This isn't quite the same as replicating the load-time library search, because
once the program links it forgets which library satisfied the undefined symbols.
If the linker and the loader find different libraries, the semantics are still
satisfied as long as the libraries that are found export the symbols you use.

I didn't construct this test case out of whole cloth: I encountered this
incompatibility while testing IBM Rational PurifyPlus against the gold linker.
That is, I found this incompatibility using a real-world, shipping product that
produces linker command lines that work with the default linker.

Of course it's possible to work around this by changing PurifyPlus, but that's
not how I understood the goals of the "gold" project: I thought users who adopt
gold would not be expected to go back to other tool vendors and ask for changes
to support it. That's why I filed this bug: to call attention to this missing
feature/incompatibility with the default GNU linker.


-- 


http://sourceware.org/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=10238

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