Re: [ghudson@MIT.EDU: Re: -Xlinker and LDFLAGS]

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

On Thu, Jan 11, 2001 at 10:06:38AM -0800, Joe Buck wrote:
> > On Jan 11, 2001, Joe Buck <jbuck@racerx.synopsys.com> wrote:
> > 
> > > And maybe -R *should* work on any platform where the linker supports
> > > the -R switch.
> > 
> > This would probably make matters even worse.  GNU ld accepts -R as an
> > alias to -R on all platforms it supports.  But that doesn't mean the
> > native linker does.  So, GCC's accepting -R would depend on whether
> > it's configured to use GNU ld or the native linker.  Doesn't appeal to
> > me.
> 
> Fine, only support -R where we know that either GNU ld is always used,
> or the native linker supports -R.

We would either need to track all those platforms, or automatically
detect them.

Deteting them a la Autoconf would be interesting (in the Chinese curse
sense); just because a given platform's linker accepts -R doesn't mean
that the linker is doing what we expect.

As an example, GNU ld itself assigns completely different means to -Rfoo
depending on whether foo is a directory or not.


I'll reiterate my suggestion that on platforms where we don't already
pass -R, we should recognize and warn about it.  Something like "-R is way
nonportable, maybe you want to start using -Wl".  I was the one who started
the last round of discussion on this topic, but I've become convinced that
silently supporing -R may not be best for users in the long run.


Phil

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