[ia64-abi] Issue 74 - Section Indices

[Cary Coutant]

>Also, even though we don't have to produce ELF files that
>use this extension, pretty much all ELF tools will need to
>change to handle this.  This is in contrast to the COMDAT
>proposal, for example.  I'm not sure that there's anything
>we can do to address this issue without this impact, but
>it is at the very least annoying.

I don't think this is true. A tool can ignore almost all of the proposal 
and still deal with any ELF file that doesn't have more than 0xff00 
sections. If they're not prepared to deal with large section tables, 
they'll see the special value SHN_XINDEX in the e_shnum field. Likewise, 
they can ignore the parallel array unless they see SHN_XINDEX in the 
st_shndx field.

I actually preferred the original suggestion to set e_shnum to 0 for 
large section tables. That way, old tools not prepared to deal with large 
section tables think they're looking at an empty file.

-cary