Re: plmerge core dumps...

[Gregory Casamento]

An observation.  I only see this on subsequent installs.  The first always goes ok.  

Another question.  How do i switch to ld.gold?

On Thu, Feb 13, 2020, 9:16 AM David Chisnall <gnustep@theravensnest.org> wrote:

On 13/02/2020 10:35, Richard Frith-Macdonald wrote:
> Is it a bug in the linker?

It is, but it is a bug that shows up *only* with ld -r.  LLD did not
support ld -r for a long time and that made no difference to over 90% of
the things in the FreeBSD ports collection.  It is a very rarely used
corner case for the linker and so likely to be very poorly tested (it
also has quite poorly defined semantics, which is part of the problem).

GNUstep Make uses this for 'subprojects'.  We hit this early because
-base Additions is a subproject.  These are compiled as .o files and
then linked to form a single .o file using ld -r.  Most modern build
systems would typically just pass the list of .o files to the parent
project to link, but GNUstep Make tries to create a single subproject.o.

It is good that -base tests this corner case of -make, because it would
otherwise hit external users, but I am not convinced by the value of
this option in GNUstep Make overall (though, as I have said before, I am
also not convinced of the value of investing time and engineering
resources in maintaining a custom build system that does not compose
well with any other project's build system).

David