[Nasm-devel] Opinion needed: new ELF relocations

[H. P. A. <hp...@zy...>]

The latest version of the i386 and x86-64 EFI psABI define a new set of
relocations which allow for linker-side optimizations.  gas generates
these automatically without requiring new syntax, and I would like for
NASM to follow suit (with a directive and/or command line to override,
of course.)  However, I'm somewhat leery of squeezing this into the 2.12
release, especially since a release is rather urgently needed (between
cv8 support and the necessary MachO fixes.)

Thus, I would like people's opinion on this.  As part of this, I hope to
do a rewrite of the backend interface to, among other things, remove the
butt-ugly asymmetry between absolute and relative addresses, and
introduce the concept of "hint flags" which can be used for such things
as signedness of addresses, which is currently handled by passing in a
negative size argument(!)

What do people think?  Is this important enough to risk deferring the
release over?

	-hpa