[llvm-dev] Please dogfood LLD

[Ed Maste via llvm-dev]

On 15 March 2017 at 12:02, Carsten Mattner via llvm-dev
<llvm-dev at lists.llvm.org> wrote:
> On Wed, Mar 15, 2017 at 11:41 AM, Mark Kettenis via llvm-dev
> <llvm-dev at lists.llvm.org> wrote:
>
>> Or perhaps we can cheat and include "GNU" somewhere in the
>> lld -v output ;).

This is the hack Rafael's been using for testing, adding "not GNU".
libtool also looks for "supported targets: elf" in --help output. You
can see the details of Rafael's hacks at
http://lists.llvm.org/pipermail/llvm-commits/Week-of-Mon-20161212/411904.html

> Let's please not do this. It would give the wrong signal.
> If libtool won't acknowledge lld's existence, then there
> are better ways like a rewrite and (temp) downstream patch.

Note that even if/when we get changes incorporated into libtool it
will still take a long time for the change to appear in new releases
of software packages using libtool. A downstream patch to the libtool
package in various operating systems or distributions doesn't really
help that much for the same reason.

For the FreeBSD ports tree the most likely workaround would be some
common sed magic to fix libtool's tests, along with a setting in
(hundreds of) individual port Makefiles to apply it on a case-by-case
basis.