Re: ar(1) issue building coreutils on 64-bit AIX

[Ralf Wildenhues]

Hello Eric,

* Eric Blake wrote on Fri, Aug 17, 2007 at 05:33:31AM CEST:
> 
> We ought to be consistent across all of the autotools.  I personally
> prefer ARFLAGS over AR_FLAGS, since it is CFLAGS and not C_FLAGS.

Yes, if the variable in question fulfills the same semantics.
Here, it definitely does not: Automake uses already
  ARFLAGS = cru

albeit as Makefile macro; but distinguishing between that and
environment variables can only lead to trouble.  So we cannot really
change without breaking backward compatibility.  So AR_FLAGS would come
as a natural second choice for flags to ar that are independent of the
action to be taken.  But really autotools have always usesd the scheme
that program variables may contain options, so
  AR='ar -X32_64'

seems like the most natural choice to me.  (Of course, AR_FLAGS should
still be used consistently.)

Cheers,
Ralf