Re: cwrappers vs (old)wrappers: status and path forward?

[Tobias Nygren <tnn%NetBSD.org@localhost>]

On Sat, 24 Aug 2024 13:04:24 -0400
Greg Troxel <gdt%lexort.com@localhost> wrote:

> I don't have the energy to work on this at all, but recent discussion
> about optional rust reminded me that we are still perhaps partway
> through a wrappers transition.
> 
> We have wrappers from before, and cwrappers.  cwrappers has been default
> for a really long time.  I wonder then:
> 
>   - Do people believe that they are totally equivalent functionally?
>     Or do we have "(old)wrappers is buggy in case X; fixed in
>     cwrappers"?
> 
>   - Do people believe that it makes sense to still have the old
>     wrappers?  Are they for bootstrapping?  In case of bugs?   Not
>     needed?  Something else?
> 
>   - What do people think would happen if someone set USE_CWRAPPERS=no,
>     ran into a problem, and reported it?  Anything other than being told
>     they should use cwrappers?

cwrappers lack support for coalescing arguments which
is needed in some scenarios on legacy platforms.

For example the HP-UX linker requires
-Wl,R/usr/pkg -Wl,-R/usr/pkg/foo
to be transformed into -Wl,+b,/usr/pkg:/usr/pkg/foo.
At most one +b flag must appear on the command line.

It would be nice to have support for this use case in cwrappers.
Then the old wrappers can probably be removed.
Many orbits ago I started work on adding a post-processing stage to
cwrappers where such fixups could be done, but I did not finish the
implementation.