> The main reason that it wasn't that way was because for quite some time the 
> rest of the toolchain was just not as well maintained.  That's no longer the 
> case, so now we can benefit from that work in other ports.  YAY!
>
> Benefit 1 - Consistency across similar ports
> clang-mp-* use MacPorts's ld64 to link.
> apple-gcc-4.2 uses MacPorts ld64 to link and MacPorts cctools to assemble if 
> they're installed (they're not a dependency because it would set up a 
> dependency cycle)
> gcc-mp-* should join the party.

Should? Why? They have been working perfectly fine, and if I recall
correctly, there was a problem using ld64 with gcc 4.6 (but that could
have due to other options such as --dynamic-strings)

> Benefit 2 - MacPorts philosophy
> This helps isolate bugs due to different versions of XCode being installed in 
> the same way we like to isolate bugs across OS version deltas by providing as 
> much of the library stack as possible.

Please show a list of bugs this fixes.

> Benefit 3 - Required on older OSs
> On older OS versions which don't support newer XCode, they need newer 
> versions of cctools and ld64 to even use recent compilers.

Which can easily be tested for. I figure, based on your recent
commits, that you already have these ports installed but for most
users this adds a ton of new ports that are really unnecessary.
/usr/bin/ar and friends have been working fine, and more importantly,
it's what the testers of gcc use.
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