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

[Alexandre Oliva]

On Jan 11, 2001, Richard Stallman <rms@gnu.org> wrote:

> Would it be feasible to make gcc understand the linker -R argument for
> GNU/Linux?  It looks like that would be useful.

We've gone over this issue in one of the GCC mailing lists.

GCC only accepts -R on Solaris to be compatible with Sun's C Compiler.
Supporting -R on GNU/Linux too might give people the impression that
-R is a portable switch in GCC, and then, they might start asking why
-R doesn't work on other platforms.

The answer is simple: -R is not a compiler switch, it's a linker
switch on Solaris, that Sun's C Compiler used to pass through to the
linker, GCC does similarly on Solaris for compatibility, and GNU ld
accepts for compatibility with Solaris' linker.  The GNU ld switch is
-rpath.  Other linkers have different switches that convey the same
meaning, or require environment variables to be set to convey that
meaning, or take switches such as -L to implicitly have the same
meaning as -R.

The point is that, spelled -R or -rpath, it's a switch to the linker,
and the syntax to pass a switch to the linker in GCC is -Wl, or
-Xlinker.  Accepting -R in GCC would give people a false sense of
portability.

This is my opinion on this subject.  Others' may differ.

-- 
Alexandre Oliva   Enjoy Guarana', see http://www.ic.unicamp.br/~oliva/
Red Hat GCC Developer                  aoliva@{cygnus.com, redhat.com}
CS PhD student at IC-Unicamp        oliva@{lsd.ic.unicamp.br, gnu.org}
Free Software Evangelist    *Please* write to mailing lists, not to me