Re: [RFA] Add stabs entries for coalesced symbols.

[Ian Lance Taylor <ian at airs dot com>]

Klee Dienes <klee@apple.com> writes:

> On Tuesday, November 19, 2002, at 01:23 AM, Ian Lance Taylor wrote:
> 
> > Coalesced symbols look quite similar to COMDAT sections (e.g.,
> > SEC_LINK_DUPLICATES_DISCARD).  They're called coalesced *symbols*, but
> > in BFD terminology they are really *sections*.  It would be nice if
> > you mentioned this in your new documentation.  Thanks.
> 
> My understanding is that coalesced symbols are similar to, but not
> quite the same as COMDAT sections.  In our implementation, coalesced
> symbols are placed into sections marked with the S_COALESCED flag,
> each of which may contain any number of coalesced symbols.  I've tried
> to make the documentation reflect this a bit better (speaking of
> which, I should mention that these docs are extensively plagiarized
> from docs written by another engineer at Apple; I'm just adapting them
> as best I can from the release notes for use in the stabs document).
> 
> Are you saying that our BFD Mach-O layer should be mapping each symbol
> in a Mach-O coalesced section into a separate BFD section flagged with
> SEC_LINK_DUPLICATES_DISCARD?  Unfortunately, we haven't yet extended
> our BFD layer to anything beyond that needed to support GDB and
> objdump/objcopy/etc., but it would be nice to know how to proceed for
> future reference.

I only intended to say that it would be nice if your documentation
mentioned COMDAT sections and SEC_LINK_DUPLICATES_DISCARD in
connection with coalesced symbols.  They are very similar (I do
understand the distinction you mention), and I believe it will help
people understand the documentation.

Ian