Re: LD not precious?

[Eric Blake]

According to Philip A. Prindeville on 1/14/2010 8:35 PM:
>> Why?  The whole point is that you can compile and link a program using
>> just $CC, so LD should not be needed in those cases.  It is only desirable
>> to mark it precious in the cases where LD will be used in addition to CC,
>> but since that should not be the default for all packages, then the
>> packages that WANT to use LD should be the ones responsible for marking it
>> precious.  I don't see anything wrong with autoconf's current behavior.
> 
> Right.  And I'm saying that in 99% of the cases where cross-compilation is 
> happening (i.e. $host != $target), that the loader *is* needed.

You missed our point.  $CC, even in the cross-compilation case, should
generally be sufficiently smart enough to use the correct cross-loader
without the need for $LD.  In other words, it is only in rare cases that
you would ever need to directly call ld, rather than relying on the
compiler driver (libtool is one of those cases, but it marks LD precious).

> 
> Regrettably, most people do an extremely bad job writing cross-compilation 
> friendly packages.

Feel free to file bug reports to packages that use $LD but didn't mark it
precious.  But their lack of using the tool correctly doesn't make it a
bug in autoconf for not making LD precious for everyone, since not
everyone needs LD.  For that matter, you can use autoconf without calling
AC_PROG_CC, in which case not even $CC will be precious.

-- 
Don't work too hard, make some time for fun as well!

Eric Blake             address@hidden

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