On Thu, May 15, 2025 at 12:52:17PM +0100, Sam James wrote: > Sam James <s...@gentoo.org> writes: > > GCC requires `ar` and `ranlib` to have plugin support when using LTO. While > > the situation has improved as many distributions install the GCC plugin > > to a location that GNU Binutils can automatically find, this isn't required > > and isn't done by default. [...] > (The AC_CHECK_TOOL changes aren't right, needs to be > called-then-checked, but I won't send a v2 yet as still testing it and > want feedback on the idea of it.)
If practical to do so, configure should automatically find whatever tools are needed for a successful compilation, so the idea is fine in principle. But I think it is a problem if configure ends up selecting gcc-ar over ar in a scenario when plain 'ar' would work and gcc-ar doesn't. I imagine you will also need to patch libtool to find gcc-nm. At the same time, it's not unreasonable to expect that users who set non-default compilation flags might also need to set a non-default AR, RANLIB, NM, etc. as appropriate for their environment -- so if the configure tests end up too complex, or take too much time, then it's also fine to just pass the buck to the user. Cheers, Nick
