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Re: [PATCH] New --pe-dll-characteristcs switch for PE ld.


Christopher Faylor wrote:
> On Fri, Mar 06, 2009 at 06:48:09AM +0000, Dave Korn wrote:
>> It's only the extra debug option that mentions pe by name.  So if it
>> was my choice I'd now want to call the flag "--dll-characteristics".
>> Do you or any of the other regular maintainers have any suggestions?

> --characteristics 

  This removes the only part of the name that distinguishes whether it refers
to the "Characteristics" field or the "DllCharacteristics".

> or --pe-characteristics.

  I could live with this, because it's part of the optional PE header, and the
Characteristics field is part of the base COFF header, so could in theory be
denoted by "--coff-characteristics".

  Can you enlarge on how you would see the name "--dll-characteristics"
causing confusion?  I think it's an odd kind of end-user who'd know enough to
have a reason to be looking to set these bits, yet somehow be surprised by
what the option was called.  Most people who end up using it will, I think, be
either (most common) non-developer-end-users who want to build packages from
source and will run into problems which someone will answer by saying "Add
-dll-characteristics=tsaware to the linker flags", and they'll just cut and
paste it without caring what it means, or (less common) developers fully aware
of the PE format who will know exactly what the name DllCharacteristics means
and not be confused by its applicability to more than DLLs alone (and
conceivably be surprised to find the option named differently).  I'm really
not grasping the problem that you think could arise.

    cheers,
      DaveK


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