Re: Is this supposed to work, or am I loopy?

[Marc Espie <espie at quatramaran dot ens dot fr>]

In article <200101081930.LAA11488@elmo.cygnus.com> you write:
>Hi Guys,
>
>: From Joe:
>:
>: What I'm saying is that the difference is gratuitous and is caused
>: by the gcc driver.

>But it is not gratuitous.  The support (by gcc) for -R under some
>OS'es is a convenience but a requirement.  GCC does not gratuitously
>decide to not support -R, it actually provides the completely
>standard, and workable, -Wl,-R option.  Supporting -R is non-standard,
>and is only provided as a nicety to help users who are used to
>Solaris compilers that do the translation of -R to -Wl,-R behind their
>backs.


Err, wow. Now  -Wl,-R is standard.

That's complete news to me.

Especially as the linker may not be gnu ld.

Whereas the gcc driver is supposed to be there to suppress gratuitous
differences.

Is it just me, or is this reasoning backwards ? Namely, trying to 
uniformously support -R at gcc levels for all systems where the linker
can provide the correct semantics (eventually, with differences at what
it passes to the linker), would that not simplify what the user needs
to type and remember.

Taking a gratuitous analogy, you don't expect to have to add -Wa,-k when
you use pic code on some architectures, do you ?