Re: [PATCH] Include alloca.h for bfd

[Nick Clifton <nickc at cambridge dot redhat dot com>]

Hi Thiemo, Hi Ian,

> In the past I did not permit alloca to be used in BFD, because on
> systems which do not have alloca the version in libiberty would call
> xmalloc, which might cause the program to crash when it ran out of
> memory.  I believe that BFD should never crash because it runs out of
> memory; instead, it should return the appropriate error to the caller.
> (That's why I wrote the objalloc interface when obstacks were changed
> to no longer support a failure to allocate memory.)  However, I do not
> know what the current thinking is on alloca in BFD.

I agree with your policy.  I was unaware of the problems involved with
using alloca, which is why I did not enforce the rule as you used to
do.  Now that I am aware of it I will try to enforce it in the future
and also remove the current uses of alloca.

Thiemo - rather than including alloca.h how about changing the code in
linker.c to use objalloc_alloc() instead ?

Cheers
        Nick