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

[Nick Clifton <nickc at redhat dot com>]

Hi Joe,

: > 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.
: 
: "behind their backs"?

Oh alright, that was contentious wording.

: The driver distributes options to the tools that they are intended
: to work with, for the most part passing flags through unchanged to
: the preprocessor (OK, that goes away now for the most part), main
: compiler, linker, and assembler.  -Wl, is a mechanism that lets
: anything be passed, including switches that have a conflicting
: meaning.  For -R there is no conflicting meaning.

Ok, so the basic complaint is that since no other tool uses the -R
option the gcc compiler driver ought to be smart enough to known that
it can pass -R on to the linker, right ?


: If there is a good reason for ld to be compatible from Solaris to Linux,
: then there is the same good reason for gcc to be compatible.  Solaris
: isn't just one oddball platform, this -R behavior is SVR4.  SVR4 linking
: behavior was copied by GNU ld because it was felt to be a good design.
: Since the switch from a.out to ELF, almost every aspect of linking on
: GNU/Linux was copied from Solaris, except one: for some reason I cannot
: fathom, stubbornness on the part of some is blocking us from fixing this
: last incompatibility.
: 
: It is pointous to be half-way compatible.
        ^^^^^^^^

Err maybe you mean "pointless" ?


Anyway I think you have convinced me, so I withdraw any objections to
the patch.  Unfortunately I am not the guy you have to convince :-(

Cheers
	Nick