Re: COLLECT_GCC and friends

[Michael Meissner <meissner at cygnus dot com>]

On Tue, Jan 23, 2001 at 05:42:40PM -0700, Jeffrey A Law wrote:
> 
> 
>   In message <20010122115543B.mitchell@codesourcery.com>you write:
>   > 
>   > We pass COLLECT_GCC and COLLECT_GCC_OPTIONS through the environment
>   > rather than through command-line arguments to collect2?
>   > 
>   > It's rather tricky us hiding these things away, and makes cutting and
>   > pasting -v output in the shell not work, which is very unfriendly to
>   > debugging on platforms where collect2 is used.
>   > 
>   > What's the rationale?
> I suspect most of this braindamage is related to when collect2 was actually
> called "ld" and we had to play silly games to make sure the right options got
> passed to the right program.  It can probably be cleaned up significantly now
> that collect2 is actually called collect2.

And speaking from the times I was actually debugging collect2, it will make it
much easier to debug if we stop using environment variables.  It may also
eliminate some failures if people are close to the limit for size of
environment passed to a child process (speaking as somebody who routinely has
7k of environment strings passed and has had to worry about the max arg+env
size in earlier UNIXen).

-- 
Michael Meissner, Red Hat, Inc.  (GCC group)
PMB 198, 174 Littleton Road #3, Westford, Massachusetts 01886, USA
Work:	  meissner@redhat.com		phone: +1 978-486-9304
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