Re: TODO additions

[Richard Stallman <rms@gnu.org>]

    > ORDINARY_LINK is one of those symbols.  Right now it is defined in
    > certain *.h files.  Part of this proposal is that Autoconf should
    > define it directly.

    What proposal?  I haven't said that, at least.

Someone proposed to eliminate the *.h files and determine the
information with Autoconf.  That means either defining ORDINARY_LINK
with Autoconf or eliminating it entirely.

If nobody is advocating that now, then there is no need to argue about
it.

    [Why would Emacs need to be linked differently from any other program?

I don't know "Why would it?" but I can answer the question "Why does
it?"  Emacs needed to use its own special crt0.o file and that
required calling ld directly.  At first it was always done that way.
Later on some systems we arranged to use cc.  So we added the
ORDINARY_LINK flag for those systems.

The question is relevant if you are thinking of implementing a
replacement for this code, which would always use cc to link.  I think
that would be a nice simplification if it works, but hard to do.

Unless and until that change is made, we need to keep supporting the
use of ORDINARY_LINK, which means that one way or another configure.in
must decide the value of ORDINARY_LINK.