Errors in GNU ld version 2.10 (with BFD 2.10) [host=powerpc-linux]

[Burt Silverman/Raleigh/IBM]

Greetings address@hidden:

I found a stream of bugs, all of which are normally of no consequence.
However, a slight beefing up of the code would be a good thing. Here is my
sequence of events:

1. I have topdir/binutils-2.10 and I have created topdir/build-binutils.

2. I inadvertently did a configure and make while I was in binutils-2.10.

3. I decided this was a bad idea, or, if not a bad idea, not such a good
idea either, and I did a make distclean.

4. Because of a bug in the ld/Makefile, the file
topdir/binutils-2.10/ld/stringify.sed was not removed.

5. Due to the nature of VPATH, when I later tried to configure and make in
topdir/build-binutils, the file topdir/binutils-2.10/ld/stringify.sed was
found.

6. Due to a secondary bug, the located stringify.sed is not also found by
emultempl/linux.em.

7. Due to a more serious error, the build process does not come to a
grinding halt when stringify.sed is not found by emultempl/linux.em.

===========================================================

Part II. A bug that only shows up when using an ld built with the above
error:

File: ldlex.c
Function: lex_redirect:

The statement "tmp = yy_create_string_buffer (string, strlen (string));"

should be followed by an initialization of tmp->yy_fill_buffer to 0.

Otherwise, on my system the value shows up as 1 if I invoke ld as
/usr/bin/ld, and 0 if I invoke ls as simply "ld". Although normally this
makes no difference, with an improperly built ld, the program will run for
a very very very very long time. It is probably good practice to initialize
variables.