Re: sparc: ld: --relax and -r may not be used together

[Riccardo Mottola]

Hi,
> > Of course, we now need testing with various compilers
> > on various platforms.  We switched from -r to -Wl,-r
> > to have it work properly on both GCC and clang.  Hopefully
> > -mno-relax works with clang too.
-Wl,-r is I think more correct. When looking at "others" who had the 
problem on the net, they used it too. I have seen some new posts too, 
but probably none included gcc 4.6 ? I don't know about clang. --relax 
and --wno-relax appear to enable some kind of optimization I could not 
even fond exactly what it is.

Apparently the default of "relax" is there for everybody, but since on 
x86 it does nothing, the majority of people never noticed, because if it 
does nothing it does not cause errors :)
> It actually doesn't even seem to work with GCC 4.6.  When building
> gnustep-base with GCC 4.6.0 on Linux i386, I now get --
>
> Making all for subproject Additions...
> gcc -nostdlib -Wl,-r -mno-relax        -shared-libgcc -fexceptions -o 
> ./obj/subproject.o obj/Additions.obj/GSObjCRuntime.m.o 
> obj/Additions.obj/GCObject.m.o obj/Additions.obj/GCArray.m.o 
> obj/Additions.obj/GCDictionary.m.o obj/Additions.obj/GSLock.m.o 
> obj/Additions.obj/GSMime.m.o obj/Additions.obj/GSXML.m.o 
> obj/Additions.obj/GSFunctions.m.o obj/Additions.obj/GSInsensitiveDictionary.m.o 
> obj/Additions.obj/NSArray+GNUstepBase.m.o 
> obj/Additions.obj/NSAttributedString+GNUstepBase.m.o 
> obj/Additions.obj/NSBundle+GNUstepBase.m.o 
> obj/Additions.obj/NSCalendarDate+GNUstepBase.m.o 
> obj/Additions.obj/NSData+GNUstepBase.m.o 
> obj/Additions.obj/NSDebug+GNUstepBase.m.o 
> obj/Additions.obj/NSError+GNUstepBase.m.o 
> obj/Additions.obj/NSFileHandle+GNUstepBase.m.o 
> obj/Additions.obj/NSLock+GNUstepBase.m.o 
> obj/Additions.obj/NSMutableString+GNUstepBase.m.o 
> obj/Additions.obj/NSNumber+GNUstepBase.m.o 
> obj/Additions.obj/NSObject+GNUstepBase.m.o 
> obj/Additions.obj/NSPropertyList+GNUstepBase.m.o 
> obj/Additions.obj/NSProcessInfo+GNUstepBase.m.o 
> obj/Additions.obj/NSStream+GNUstepBase.m.o 
> obj/Additions.obj/NSString+GNUstepBase.m.o 
> obj/Additions.obj/NSTask+GNUstepBase.m.o 
> obj/Additions.obj/NSThread+GNUstepBase.m.o 
> obj/Additions.obj/NSURL+GNUstepBase.m.o obj/Additions.obj/Unicode.m.o ;
> gcc: error: unrecognized command line option ‘-mno-relax’
>
> So, more sophistication is needed ...
That's strange... gcc must have dropped that option? Or perhaps it is 
present only if gcc is compiled to issue automatically --relax to the 
linker? That would make no sense: an options needs to be there and in 
case "do nothing". With gcc 4.5.2 it works. -dumpspecs should tell you 
if it has the relax option built in.

I don't know about clang, but if gcc stopped supporting it, we need some 
more magic. Do you think it you can detect this via configure?

Riccardo