> I'm still not entirely convinced that this is the way to go. It seems > to me that ideally one wants to be able to select the linker at > runtime. I don't see how this patch supports that. What am I > missing?
It covers the first step by letting you run "ld.bfd" or "ld.gold" to choose. Having the two binaries installed by those names is a good start and seems likely to be part of how any fancier plan would work, so why not start there? This setup is compatible with using "alternatives" to switch a $(bindir)/ld symlink. Using "alternatives" is outside the scope of what 'make install' should do, so having it install a plain symlink makes sense. Packagers will drop the ld symlink and do their own thing. (This is exactly what we are doing now in Fedora >= 13.) Another obvious approach is to add a wrapper script for $(bindir)/ld that groks an argument like --gold or --bfd to choose which real ld to run. That could be used by hand and by gcc -Wl,--gold, etc. That is also fine by me. But it requires inventing some new plan for where the system-wide default is configured. IMHO it seems better just to leave that sort of thing to packagers. Thanks, Roland
