[cfe-commits] r139677 - /cfe/trunk/lib/Driver/Driver.cpp

[Nick Kledzik]

On Jun 14, 2013, at 10:01 AM, Rafael Espíndola <rafael.espindola at gmail.com> wrote:
>> Sorry for the really late review, but why this environment variable
>> instead of implementing the -B command line option?
>> 
>> 
>> When Apple made the transition from llvm-gcc to clang I added this to be
>> backward compatible with
>> llvm-gcc and gcc.  Nick was using this feature to select the appropriate
>> linker for testing.  The -B option
>> was added by Chandler around r99159 and then extended by Joerg in r125111,
>> so I'm not sure why
>> we didn't just use it then..
>> 
>> Are you proposing we deprecate this feature?  I could be easily convinced
>> either way, but would
>> prefer we leave it in place to maintain backward compatibility.  Also,
>> there's really no maintenance
>> cost with leaving it in place.
> 
> I found this while grepping for "path" and was just curious why it was added.
> 
> It is not a big deal and if it is being used we should keep it. If the
> user can use -B, it would have a small preference for removing it, but
> mostly just from a dislike for environment variables (and duplicated
> functionality).

The reason I like it is when testing a new linker against any project, I can set COMPILER_PATH and build the project as-is.  The command line option makes sense when you own the project and want to control the linker being used.  But COMPILER_PATH works great when testing against other peoples projects.

-Nick