https://gcc.gnu.org/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=100937
--- Comment #10 from frankhb1989 at gmail dot com --- (In reply to Jonathan Wakely from comment #9) > (In reply to frankhb1989 from comment #7) > The toolchain might not be ELF-specific, but > on targets that *do* use ELF, of course the ELF specification is relevant, True. > and deviating from it should not be done lightly. Deviating... well, are there any documented policies to clarify how much room to the non-conformance here? > Just because portability between ELF and PE/COFF is difficult and requires > care, doesn't mean we should also make it difficult to guarantee portability > across different linux distros that are all using ELF. That's just silly. > You don't make anything better by making everything equally bad. I don't mean that one portability is just unconditionally more important than another. But there are certainly things beyond portability if you are really caring "everything". Keeping the "portability", if any across ELF, makes sense to maintainers of the distros. But it is not obvious to most users, which are not specialists of ELF. For those not relying on the sneaky feature, they silently pay the unneeded cost *by default*. This is probably against to the intuition to most C and C++ users. Moreover, this also affects almost every *end users*, which should not care about such features at all. So here is the "bad": the default configuration makes things unexpected (and a laborious way to prevent it) for most users, albeit only in QoI sense. Such default may even have effects on the adoption of free software. Changing the default may likely reduce such bad things, at the cost of the compatibility. I am not arguing the change is absolutely necessary, but it is certainly NOT "making everything equally bad". (This would not remove interposition for the minority who need them indeed.) BTW, I'm not aware of such a cross-distro guarantee has been widely adopted and relied on. It is well-known the Linux kernel has the policy to maintain the stability of syscalls, but in the userland... is it already distro-specific? Correct me if I am wrong here. (Any source?)
