Re: [Bug binutils/19104] [PATCH] 'add symbol' feature in objcopy

[Nick Clifton]

Hi Ronald,

> > How about this:
> >
> >    If the symbol already exists and the symbol that is being added has the
> > warning flag set, then it is treated as the addition of a warning, and it is
> > inserted before the real symbol.
> >    Otherwise if the new version of the symbol has the same flags as the
> > current version then the addition is ignored.
> >    Otherwise an error message is generated.
> I am not really sure what you mean here. As far as I understand, a warning
> symbol will print a warning in the linker when the following symbol is used.
> The text in the warning is the name of the symbol and the value is irrelevant.

Doh!  Yes, I was getting confused about how warning symbols are used.

> I was more
> thinking about adding another flag (which is not a real symbol flag), like
> 'before=<symbol>'. This will surely complicate the 'parse_symflags' function,
> but at least not trigger symbol lookup for all --add-symbol, only when this
> flag is given. Or maybe another suffix like '@<symbol>' to specify before which
> other symbol the symbol (whether warning or not) needs to be inserted.

Mmmm, OK - that makes sense.

> AH, and maybe there needs to be 'escapes' in case the user wants to specify
> symbols containing ':' or ',' or '@'...

True.

Would you care to submit a revised patch then ?

Cheers
  Nick