Re: plmerge core dumps...

[David Chisnall]

On 13/02/2020 10:35, Richard Frith-Macdonald wrote:
> Is it a bug in the linker?

It is, but it is a bug that shows up *only* with ld -r.  LLD did not 
support ld -r for a long time and that made no difference to over 90% of 
the things in the FreeBSD ports collection.  It is a very rarely used 
corner case for the linker and so likely to be very poorly tested (it 
also has quite poorly defined semantics, which is part of the problem).

GNUstep Make uses this for 'subprojects'.  We hit this early because 
-base Additions is a subproject.  These are compiled as .o files and 
then linked to form a single .o file using ld -r.  Most modern build 
systems would typically just pass the list of .o files to the parent 
project to link, but GNUstep Make tries to create a single subproject.o.

It is good that -base tests this corner case of -make, because it would 
otherwise hit external users, but I am not convinced by the value of 
this option in GNUstep Make overall (though, as I have said before, I am 
also not convinced of the value of investing time and engineering 
resources in maintaining a custom build system that does not compose 
well with any other project's build system).

David