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

[Phil Edwards <pedwards at disaster dot jaj dot com>]

On Fri, Jan 05, 2001 at 10:33:27AM -0800, Nick Clifton wrote:
> 
> Ah, I see.  I guess it is a trivial thing to fix.  I am not sure if it
> is really important though.  Support for the pass through of -R does
> not appear to be documented and there is an official way of passing
> switches to the linker that does work.  Not my call really.  The patch
> below might make the i386 Linux target consistent with the Sparc
> Solaris target, although there are still plenty of other targets that
> do not support this abbreviation.

Maybe on those platforms where -R doesn't get passed through, we can
print a more useful message than `unrecognized option'.  After all, it's
"recognized" on other platforms.

% gcc -R/some/path ...
gcc: warning: -R doesn't do what you think it does, maybe you wanna take
     a look at -Wl there buddy?
%

I don't feel strongly about it.  After reading this thread and listening
to my users,

    1)  I agree with Joe that the difference is gratuitous,
    2)  I agree with Alexandre that -R isn't as portable as some think,
    3)  I feel that we should recognize and warn about the problem rather
        than passing it through and exacerbating the misunderstanding.

Linux should perhaps be an exception, since the documentation for ld
on Linux states that -Rdir is specifically supported for compatibility
with sparcs.  Right now it really looks like one hand has no idea what
the other is doing.  :-)


Phil

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