RE: binutils status?

["Robert Collins" <robert dot collins at itdomain dot com dot au>]

> -----Original Message-----
> From: Charles Wilson [mailto:cwilson@ece.gatech.edu] 
> Sent: Monday, May 20, 2002 6:44 PM

> Two ideas:
> 1) making auto-import the default
> 2) turning off the warnings
> 
> You appear to not like either one.  I don't really care about the 
> warnings, but the auto-import thing should be default.  However, I 
> wonder how long these "warnings" are going to persist.  Using 
> auto-import is not a *bug* or *oops, I forgot to declspec() 
> something* 
> -- it's the way DLLs are done.

But it's not complete. One cannot link against all .dll's with
auto-import, and no speed tests of normal vs auto-import have been
seriously conducted. I still maintain that a profile driven
recompile+link is the way to go, and that when that's done auto-import
can be tossed out.
 
> I look at auto-import as "the new and better and more unixlike way of 
> building shared libs".  You seem to view them as "nice 
> feature, but you 
> really ought to do it the old-fashioned way".  In my view, 
> the warnings 
> go away eventually -- they were just there during the "trial phase", 
> which has now stretched to a REALLY long time.  In your view, the 
> warnings are TRUE warnings about BAD programming practice, 
> and stay forever.

The warnings should stay IMO. They aren't errors, but they are
important. 
 
> > I like to now about unresolved data
> > references.  I would really like to see how --auto-import works with
> > new C++ ABI before I am comfortable with that switch being on by
> > default.
> 
> 
> Well, now, that's something I hadn't considered.  Good point. 
>  Warnings 
> should probably stay, then.  But that doesn't mean that auto-import 
> shouldn't become the default.

For Danny - you can always build with --no-auto-import if you need the
original behaviour for some project. I think that auto-import should be
the default for cygwin, for now. It's too useful in the common case to
be disabled.

Rob