Re: gold and 2.20 release

[Ian Lance Taylor <iant at google dot com>]

Matthias Klose <doko@ubuntu.com> writes:

> On 13.10.2009 23:24, Ian Lance Taylor wrote:
>> Any opinions on how to handle gold with the binutils 2.20 release?
>> There have been a number of changes since the branch was created, and
>> I'm tempted to simply move the entire gold and elfcpp directories onto
>> the branch.  I assume that nobody has been doing much testing of them,
>> so this should have little effect on stability.
>
> I would appreciate it. Will you update gold on the branch for 2.20.x
> releases as well? For which architectures is gold considered
> non-experimental?

Yes, I could update for future releases as well.

gold should work for ordinary use on i386, x86_64, and sparc.


> gold is now required for some GCC lto optimizations, so (as a packager
> for a distribution) I would like to ship it in an appropriate way, not
> getting in the way of ld, but having gold available if it's
> needed. Currently you can only use either the old ld or gold, there's
> no possibility to tell gcc which linker to use, which might introduce
> some regressions if you always use gold instead of ld. Is there a way
> to tell gcc which linker to use?

Put the linker in an otherwise empty directory under the name "ld".
Then invoke gcc with a -B option pointing to that directory.

Ian