-Xlinker and LDFLAGS

[Greg Hudson]

Hi.  This bug report is about emacs 20.7.  It applies to at least
Linux.

The GNU Makefile standards are designed such that a user should be
able to "make LDFLAGS=blah".  The normal treatment of LDFLAGS in this
context is to be passed to the compiler during the linking of
programs.

emacs treats LDFLAGS a little differently.  src/Makefile.in dumps
$(LDFLAGS) into $(ALL_LDFLAGS), and then (at least on platforms where
LINKER is not specified) prefixes each word of the flags with
-Xlinker, such that the flags are passed directly to the linker.  This
means that emacs has to be treated differently from other packages;
for instance, you can't use an LDFLAGS value such as
-Wl,-R/thing/to/add/to/run/path.

I don't have a patch.  Presumably the other elements of ALL_LDFLAGS
are tailored to be passed directly to ld, so simply eliminating
YMF_PASS_LDFLAGS (or applying it only to STARTFLAGS) would probably
break things.