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

[Peter Rosin]

On Fri, Aug 17, 2007 at 08:56:38PM +0200, Ralf Wildenhues wrote:
> 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.)

Just pointing out that for libtool the archiver is never invoked as
either of:
        $AR $AR_FLAGS cru ...
        $AR $AR_FLAGS x ...
        $AR $AR_FLAGS t ...
it is always one of these instead:
        $AR $AR_FLAGS ...
        $AR x ...
        $AR t ...

That usage of $AR_FLAGS seems consistent with your description
of $ARFLAGS in automake.

Cheers,
Peter