Re: How can I test if the GNU or Sun linker is used?

[Dr. David Kirkby]

Russ Allbery wrote:
> Philip Herron <address@hidden> writes:
>
> > All you should really care about is making sure your environment has a
> > compatible c compiler or whats needed and autoconf does that for you,
> > with the prog_c macro then it inserts into the makefile etc. And you
> > just have to make sure your code is compatible. I would discourage
> > trying to over-think and separate what compilers, assemblers are being
> > used to give warnings, because thats not what you want. You want
> > autoconf to figure out your environment for you so you don't have to
> > have complicated makefiles and options to build your program.
>
> Usually this sort of problem comes up because one wants to pass flags
> like -Bsymbolic -z defs --version-script=library.map to the linker, but
> you have to know which linker you're using to know whether you can use
> that syntax or -xldscope=symbolic or something else instead.

That's basically the reason. Sage is made up of lots of bits of 
software. Some have many GNU-isms. They pass things like -soname 
directly the the linker, which fails if the Sun linker is used.


What I have done in Sage is to test the version of the linker, to see if 
it Sun or GNU. But this relies on the fact the first copy of 'ld' in the 
path is the one used when building gcc. That might not be true. So 
whilst my hacks do allow Sage to build with either the GNU or Sun tools, 
it does require the path is set correctly. I'm sure they would break if 
a mix of Sun and GNU tools are used by gcc.

I'd rather not use libtool - I don't want to learn yet another tool. 
Especially since it has already caused me some grief on Solaris.

I must admit, any time I've seen anyone display the output of gcc -v on 
Solaris, it has always been obvious what linker and assembler are used. 
But I don't believe its necessary to specify them when building gcc, so 
conceivably gcc -v might not show it.

Dave