From mboxrd@z Thu Jan  1 00:00:00 1970
From: Donn Terry <donn@verinet.com>
To: Ian Lance Taylor <ian@airs.com>
Cc: nickc@cygnus.com, binutils@sourceware.cygnus.com
Subject: Re: Proposed objcopy patch
Date: Thu, 01 Jul 1999 00:00:00 -0000
Message-id: <373CF24C.17D32143@verinet.com>
References: <199905142116.OAA18159@elmo.cygnus.com> <19990515011618.765.qmail@daffy.airs.com>
X-SW-Source: 1999-q2/msg00042.html

In short, Ian suggests propigating the patch backwards into the PE
reader, so the internal BFD structures are correct.

1)  I concur completely with the spirit of that.

2) PE is probably better named "not-quite-COFF" but let's not
go there.

3) A fix in the back end propigates itself back to user space
in a way I think Ian should comment upon.  PE basically has
changed the meaning of the s_paddr/lma field, and it's resonable
to have both meanings in the internal data structure in separate
fields.  For most of BFD and its users, that's probably an
improvement, but it presents a problem for objdump.  Either
the format of the --headers output needs to change or there
needs to be special case code so that the "interesting" value
is printed, as a function of the object format being dumped.
(That is, one "COFF" field will go into one of two places; when
printing either both (one guaranteed to be zero) need to be printed,
or objdump needs to know which is "live".)

In general, that problem has been a continuing nuisance about
PE format, so a good solution would probably pay itself back
many times over.

Donn