Re: [PATCH] Makefile: remove the NO_R_TO_GCC_LINKER flag

From: Jeff King <peff@peff.net>
Date: May 16, 2019, 22:25 UTC
Message-ID: <20190516222525.GC11784@sigill.intra.peff.net>
In-Reply-To: <20190516180521.1933-1-avarab@gmail.com>

On Thu, May 16, 2019 at 08:05:21PM +0200, Ævar Arnfjörð Bjarmason wrote:

Show 14 quoted lines

> From what I can tell we should, with the benefit of hindsight, have
> made this change back in 2006. GCC & ld supported this type of
> invocation back then, or since at least binutils-gdb.git's[1]
> a1ad915dc4 ("[...]Add support for -rpath[...]", 1994-07-20). Most
> people compiling git with a custom LIBDIR are going to be on a GNU-ish
> system, and having to provide this NO_R_TO_GCC_LINKER flag on top of a
> custom LIBDIR is annoying.
> 
> There are some OS's that don't support -rpath, e.g. AIX ld just
> supports "-R". Perhaps we should follow this up with some
> config.mak.uname changes, but as noted it's quite possible that nobody
> on these platforms uses this (instead libraries in the system's search
> path). We *could* also use "-Wl,-R", but let's not introduce something
> new.

So...does this mean with just your patch that the build is now broken on AIX if you use CURLDIR?

Far be it from me to care about AIX, but it seems like this is ripe for regressions, because we don't know which platforms were relying on "-R" instead of "-Wl,-rpath", and now everybody will be using the latter by default.

-Peff