riscv assembler HORRENDOUS bug. kills my project outright

I have developed many forth compilers using the gnu assembler.  I have some
extensive macros to create forth word headers and to link them to forth
code.   These work flawlessly on arm32, thumb2, aarch64 and others.   they
puke on riscv.

the following macro generates   Error: redefined symbol cannot be used on
reloc
which makes absolutely no sense to me because this just works (tm)
everywhere else ive defined it :/

.macro _header name cfa
  .section data
  .int thread
  .set thread, .
  hstring "\name"
  .set lex, 0
  .int \cfa
  .previous
.endm


Also, would it be too much to ask for a .req directive for riscv? I am not
using the C pre-processor at all and I need to be able to alias registers
and give them descriptive names.


--=20
=E2=80=9CWhen something can be read without effort,
great effort has gone into its writing.=E2=80=9D

=E2=80=95 Enrique Jardiel Poncela =E2=80=95