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

[H.J. Lu]

On Wed, Aug 6, 2025 at 5:24 AM Jan Beulich <jbeulich@suse.com> wrote:
>
> 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

Plugin is supported on most (> 90%?) platforms/targerts.
BFD_SUPPORTS_PLUGINS check makes code less maintainable.

-- 
H.J.