Re: [PATCH] Include alloca.h for bfd

[Ian Lance Taylor <ian at zembu dot com>]

Thiemo Seufer <ica2_ts@csv.ica.uni-stuttgart.de> writes:

> this checks for inclusion of alloca.h, which is required on IRIX6.5
> to compile e.g. linker.c.

This patch is incorrect.  Any declaration of alloca or inclusions of
alloca.h must be done as in gas/as.h.

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.

Ian