Re: COFF weak symbols

[Ian Lance Taylor <ian@cygnus.com>]

   From: "Mark E." <snowball3@usa.net>
   Date: Sat, 3 Oct 1998 11:25:18 +0000

   I'm interested have added or in adding an extension to COFF (or at 
   least DJGPP's COFF) to have weak symbols. I've already added 
   the .weak directive to the Oct 1st snapshot, but I wanted to check 
   and see how you wanted me proceed (or even if I should 
   proceed). I'm not an object file expert, but I know just enough to 
   know I want weak symbols. The linker already seems to support 
   weak symbols, it would just be a matter of deciding where in the 
   symbol record to store the weak symbol bit (though I have an idea).

   I tried e-mailing Ian but he seems to be on vacation.

You only sent me the mail Thursday evening.  I can certainly
sympathize with how it feels when you don't get an immediate reply to
your mail--I've been there myself--but the reality is that dealing
with binutils issues from the net is an unpaid activity for me, so
there is no guaranteed response time.  As I expect you've already
seen, I replied to your message earlier this morning.

Of course, unless you need my personal input, which for an issue like
this you don't, it's probably better to send such a message to the
mailing list in the first.

The main issue with any extension like this is how to store the
information in the object file.  Once that has been determined, you
need to enhance BFD to transfer the information between the generic
internal format and the object file external format.

For COFF, I would recommend defining a new storage class C_WEAK as a
parallel to C_EXT and C_STAT.  It should be moderately straightforward
to add BFD, assembler, and linker support for this.

Ian