Re: crashes with nested archives

[Nick Clifton]

Hi Mikulas,

> Binutils-2.14 have serious problems when processing archives containing
> other archives. 

Thanks for bringing this to our attention.  I hope that you do not mind, 
but there are a couple of problems with your proposed patch:

 * It is not clear to me how nested archives can be successfully used.  
I tried a simplest test like this:

   gcc hello-world.c -c -o file1.o
   cp file1.o file2.o
   cp file1.o file3.o
   cp file1.o file4.o
   ar cr lib1.a file1.o file2.o
   ar cr lib2.a file3.o file4.o
   ar cr lib3.a  lib1.a lib2.s
  objdump -p lib3.a
  In archive lib3.a:
    objdump: lib1.a: File format not recognized
    objdump: lib2.a: File format not recognized

 So in order to proceed with fixing this bug we definitely need a test 
case that can reproduce the problem.

 * The patch assumes that there will only be one level of nested 
archives.  Instead it should recurse until there are no more nested 
archive levels to process.

 * The patch to bfd_generic_openr_next_archived_file() puts the new 
code *after* filestart has been aligned to an even byte boundary.  It 
ought to be *before* the alignment.

  * It would be helpful if you could include a ChangeLog entry for the 
patch as well.

I hope that you will consider resubmitting your patch with these points 
addressed.

Cheers
 Nick