Re: Problem with linker with binutils-040414

["H. J. Lu" <hjl at lucon dot org>]

On Fri, Apr 16, 2004 at 12:22:35AM -0400, Daniel Jacobowitz wrote:
> On Thu, Apr 15, 2004 at 09:48:03AM +0100, Nick Clifton wrote:
> > Hi Guys,
> > 
> > Daniel Kulp wrote:
> > 
> > >I have confirmed that on line 3637 of elflink.c, old_bfd is null and thus 
> > >the call to bfd_archive_filename cores.  
> > >
> > In line with this suggestion I am going to apply the following patch to 
> > stop bfd_archive_filename() seg-faulting when it is passed a NULL bfd 
> > pointer.
> > 
> > Daniel - Do you want me to apply this to the 2.15 branch ?
> 
> Yes, please do.
> 
> > bfd/ChangeLog
> > 2004-04-15  Nick Clifton  <nickc@redhat.com>
> > 
> >    * bfd.c (bfd_archive_filename): Catch NULL bfd pointers.
> > 
> > 

I don't think it is a good idea. Linker should try to avoid core dump
on bad input. But linker should abort/core dump when there is an
internal bug. In this particular case, core dump helped uncover/fix the
linker bug. Otherwise, we might discover this bug much later. I suggest
we back out this patch or change it to

	if (abfd == NULL)
	  abort ();


H.J.