RFC: Drop --disable-plugins to always enable plugins

[Jan Beulich]

On 06.08.2025 14:19, H.J. Lu wrote:
> On Tue, Aug 5, 2025 at 11:10 PM Alan Modra <amodra@gmail.com> wrote:
>>
>> On Tue, Aug 05, 2025 at 10:01:59PM -0700, H.J. Lu wrote:
>>> On Tue, Aug 5, 2025, 9:34 PM Alan Modra <amodra@gmail.com> wrote:
>>>
>>>> On Tue, Aug 05, 2025 at 09:06:29PM -0700, H.J. Lu wrote:
>>>>> BTW, should we drop --disable-plugins to always enable plugins?
>>>>> Binutils should still work with compilers which don't support plugin.
>>>>
>>>> bfd/configure.ac disables plugins for various targets, so I think we're
>>>> stuck with BFD_SUPPORTS_PLUGINS == 0.  Otherwise something would need
>>>> to be done for hpux, vms and aix to fix their ar support.
>>>>
>>>
>>> Did you mean host? If a host doesn't support dlopen,
>>> it can be treated as if dlopen fails.
>>
>> No, target.  When BFD_SUPPORTS_PLUGINS ar and other binutils use
>> a default target of "plugin".  plugin_vec uses the generic archive
>> support, while their target vec uses another archive format.
> 
> Do we enable plugin with --enable-targets=all on hpux?
> 
> Do we disable plugin on Linux when hpux is also enabled?
> 
> I enabled plugin to build cross-compiling to hpux on Linux.  There is
> no test failure.
> 
> Can we require the generic archive support if input has plugin?

Why would we want / need to force in plugin-related code when that's
entirely unused in some builds / configurations?

Jan