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.section directives with the same name but different fields

Alan Modra amodra@gmail.com
Mon Feb 10 05:21:00 GMT 2020 
On Thu, Feb 06, 2020 at 05:25:33PM +0000, bd1976 llvm wrote:
> Hi Alan, thanks for the input here. I wonder if it wouldn't be more
> consistent to error in all cases - even in the case of different group
> signatures. The only exception would need to be for the special section
> names (.text, .debug_str, etc...) that the assembler has special knowledge
> of (as you explained).

Yes, let's see how that goes.
https://sourceware.org/ml/binutils/2020-02/msg00129.html

> I wonder why creating multiple sections with the
> same name for section directives with different group signatures was
> implemented - why not just require the use of a distinct section name for
> these?

I think plain ".text" for a group's text section is fine.  Distict
names would just be yet another thing to track for a group.

> Or, now that GNU has the ",unique,N" assembly extension (
> https://sourceware.org/ml/binutils/2020-02/msg00028.html) that could be
> used if the section name is fixed - it would then be explicit in the source
> code that another section with the same name will be created.

Perhaps, but we aren't designing a new toolchain.  Backwards
compatibility can't be discarded without compelling reasons.

-- 
Alan Modra
Australia Development Lab, IBM
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