RE: timestamp in coff header breaks ld testsuite

["Donn Terry" <donnte at microsoft dot com>]

PEI does want the timestamps.  And there is (or was, unless somone
ripped it
out) code to deal with the regression tests and timestamps. (But it
isn't pretty.)

More importantly, there are customers (real world application
developers)
who use the timestamp, and have complained about its absence.  I don't
thing our covenience (which is clearly why we don't timestamp) should 
be more important than customer needs.

The right fix is to write a binary file compare that knows how to ignore
timestamps, and use that in the testsuites, but that hasn't happened
yet.

Since I haven't said it for a while: speaking wholly and solely for
myself.

Donn

-----Original Message-----
From: Nick Clifton [mailto:nickc@cambridge.redhat.com] 
Sent: Friday, November 09, 2001 2:34 AM
To: egor duda
Subject: Re: timestamp in coff header breaks ld testsuite


Hi Egor,

>   pei-based targets write a timestamp to object file header and it 
> breaks some of testcases in ld testsuite. 
> _bfd_ecoff_write_object_contents contains a comment about always 
> setting timestamp to 0, but backend overrides timestamp field later.

Which backend is doing this ?

> What is the best way to deal with it -- write a separate utility to 
> zero timestamp in already created object, or pass some flag to backend

> that timestamp should be zeroed? i wonder if any target needs this 
> field to hold actual build timestamp at all?

It is possible that some OSes do require the timestamp field to be
non-zero, and in such cases the backend must insert that value.  For
these targets we would have to mark the ld tests as expected failures.
In general though the timestamp is probably unnecessary and the backends
should leave it as zero.

Cheers
        Nick