[fpc-devel] Fix for an annoying error

[J. Gareth Moreton]

That was a conundrum I was trying to answer when making the patch.  What 
is a warning and what is an error?

A lot of the verification code is dependent on compile-time constants 
whose values depend on the compiler's target platform, including header 
sizes, so any mismatch is an error case, and the checking of header 
sizes and the COFF magic number are done together, since the correct 
header size is dependent on the magic number's value.

I didn't look too much further beyond the verification code, but if it's 
able to detect if a DLL is 32-bit on a 64-bit system and vice versa, I 
feel that's a warning rather than error because, in my experience, it's 
down to a default system configuration (I got the error on a 
freshly-installed machine) rather than something untoward.  If the DLL 
is missing, that should probably be a warning too and I'll see if I can 
make that change.  A corrupted DLL is definitely an error though.

I didn't do a verification to see if the DLL is for AArch64, for 
example, since that situation is more unlikely.  It also starts to bloat 
the compiler code.

Either way, using a DLL for a different build of Windows is a warning at 
the very least because the project will probably break when you try to 
run it.

Gareth aka. Kit


On 30/11/2021 09:47, Tomas Hajny via fpc-devel wrote:
> On 2021-11-30 08:33, J. Gareth Moreton via fpc-devel wrote:
>
>
> Hi Gareth,
>
>> For a while now I've had problems building the i386-win32 compiler
>> under my 64-bit Windows system because one of the packages fails to
>> build - this is because it thinks a statically-imported DLL (done
>> through $linklib) is invalid. Technically it is, but this system DLL
>> (for me, it is named COMMON.DLL and is in one of my system folders, so
>> it's not something I can safely modify or replace) is for 64-bit
>> Windows and is not recognised when building for 32-bit, and the only
>> 'fix' is to comment out the culprit $linklib line in the package
>> source.
>>
>> I've submitted a merge request that generates a warning instead of an
>> error if it detects the DLL is 64-bit for a 32-bit target and vice
>> versa.  The checks, however, are very strict (it checks the COFF magic
>> number, which contains a platform target, and the size of the optional
>> header), and an error is still thrown if the DLL is actually corrupted
>> or is for an unknown target.
>>
>> A warning is still thrown because the program that uses it may
>> malfunction, and might be indicative of a bug or a faulty search path
>> for the DLL.
>>
>> https://gitlab.com/freepascal.org/fpc/source/-/merge_requests/91
>
> Semantically, what's the difference between the two cases (a DLL for a 
> different architecture, or a broken DLL)? In both cases the compiled 
> executable may be used on other machines (with proper version of the 
> respective DLL), but it will fail when running it on the machine used 
> for compilation, correct? Shouldn't the compiler handle both cases the 
> same way (possibly issuing a similar warning if the DLL is not found 
> at all)?
>
> Tomas
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