Re: [Fortran,patch] PR 39178 - inline main()

[Steve Kargl <sgk at troutmask dot apl dot washington dot edu>]

On Wed, May 27, 2009 at 01:40:05AM +0100, Dave Korn wrote:
> FX wrote:
> > Just a short note: maybe deprecating it for now would be the best
> > option, because a google codesearch reveals quite a few uses:
> > http://www.google.com/codesearch?q=%22-lgfortranbegin%22&hl=en
> > 
> > I also think it's worth mentionning in the release notes.
> 
>   I would advise extreme caution with this kind of potential back-compat
> break.  Even if people's makefiles are indeed nominally "doing the wrong
> thing" by linking it explicitly rather than using the driver to get the flags
> right, it's still not our business to punish them if we can easily make our
> system forgiving of their mistakes without imposing costs on others who are
> following the more correct usage.
> 

This library is not documented anywhere in the gfortran info file.
If a user is explicitly linking to an undocumented library, then
s/he gets to deal with any changes that may occur in that library,
including its disappearance.  Also note that this isn't a shared
library where caution is necessary even with library versioning,
because 3rd party libraries or binaries are dynamically linked.
Carrying around a useless library as a shim for users leads
to extreme bloat.

If you insist that this library stick around, then gfortran 
should change MAIN__ to

void
MAIN__ (void)
{
   fprintf(stderr, "libgfortranbegin.a has been removed from GCC\n");
   fprintf(stderr, "Have a nice day!\n"); 
   abort();
}

-- 
Steve