working sed-2.05

David Mosberger-Tang (davidm@AZStarNet.com)
Thu, 2 Nov 1995 23:06:08 -0700

OK, the problem seems to be easier than it looked like. I just
uploaded a new sed binary that hopefully works well (it gets at least
through all the cases that were known to be bad previously). I'd
appreciate if you could test it as hard as possible and let me know if
anything breaks. The binary is at:

ftp://ftp.azstarnet.com/pub/linux/axp/misc/axpbin-sed-2.05.gz

If the binary turns out to work well, I'll move the fixed rx into libc
and release a new libc.

Oh, speaking of libc: the problem with the "environ" alias not working
properly was because __environ got allocated to the bss section. Ian
Taylor explained to me that aliasing in the .bss section can't work
because the aliasing in ELF and ECOFF is based on label *values* and
.bss symbols don't have a value until they get allocated by the
linker. So, the long story's short sense: forcing __environ into the
.data section by initializing it with NULL fixes the problem. I also
fixed gas so that in the future it will issue an error message when
trying to alias a symbol in the .bss section (.comm symbols, to be
precise). So if you want to use my latest libc, just be sure you
recompile misc/__environ.c after initializing __environ with NULL.
This all *will* be released RSN, but I like to batch things together
due to the size of libc et al.

Enjoy,
--david