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

[Richard Stallman]

    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.

People might get a false sense of portability either way.  If GCC
passes through -R, they might also convince their linker maintainer to
implement -R.

If we adopt -R as a standard GCC feature, we could implement it in
different ways on different systems, so that it gets the same result
on all.  Users would probably consider that a step forward.