Re: Policy: Require new dynamic loader names for entirely new ABIs?

[Steve McIntyre <steve dot mcintyre at linaro dot org>]

On Mon, Jan 20, 2014 at 11:15:52AM -0500, Carlos O'Donell wrote:
>On 01/17/2014 06:04 PM, Andrew Pinski wrote:
>> I withdraw my objection to the patch.  Though I do feel this
>> discussion should have been done on the GCC/glibc list in addition to
>> the linaro cross distro list as not every one knows about that list.
>
>I feel your pain here.

Yes, this could have worked much better. Multiple people spoke about
posting patches and discussing things more widely, but it fell through
the cracks. :-(

>I was also frustrated by lack of transparency
>when it cam to agreement on ABI details for
>ARM hard-float. At the time I was working for
>Mentor Graphics and we had to scramble to
>implement a solution.

ACK. That was more painful because we left things later than we should
have done in terms of defining the ABI, and various groups were
already publically using the same loader name for different things. In
the case of the discussion around the BE AArch64 loader, it seemed
that nobody was (yet) producing anything so there wouldn't be any
problems. Andrew: apologies for the hassle to you here...

>I support it because changing the dynamic loader
>name now is less painful than later, we have
>users that need it, and a workaround.
>
>The only thing I can say is that we make it
>policy that entirely new ABI's should always
>use a unique dynamic loader name unless the
>submitter can argue otherwise.
>
>That way in the future we never see this
>problem.
>
>Thoughts?

That would be lovely. I don't see much of a downside so long as this
is understood up front for new ports/ABIs etc. - there's very little
cost to it at that point.

Cheers,
-- 
Steve McIntyre                                steve.mcintyre@linaro.org
<http://www.linaro.org/> Linaro.org | Open source software for ARM SoCs