Comment 7 for bug 636977

I did a little investigation of this issue on Friday. I'm not too familiar with gcl: it looks like it compiles via C, and the only architecture-dependent parts are in a fork of binutils internal to the gcl source tree.

Unfortunately gcl seems to be in a dormant state at present: the last news on the website (http://www.gnu.org/software/gcl/) dates from 2005. Also the version of binutils used appears to date from around the same time period, going by the ChangeLogs. Using a version of binutils that old isn't a great idea for Thumb-2 for various reasons: many bugs have been fixed since then, and e.g. the older version of binutils won't have the Cortex-A8 erratum workaround implemented in the linker, which may lead to problems sooner or later.

I'm not sure what it takes to update the binutils used by gcl to a modern version: that might be the easiest fix (it's then kind of a packaging issue, I guess), assuming the gcl version of binutils doesn't have significant local changes (otherwise cherry-picking and backporting changes would be necessary). It seems suboptimal to maintain a fork of binutils like this though: if at all feasible, it seems like it'd be better to use the "normal" version of binutils supplied with the distro. That might entail pushing local GCL changes -- if there are any -- upstream.