In article <200503240129.UAA03513@Sparkle.Rodents.Montreal.QC.CA>,
der Mouse  <mouse@Rodents.Montreal.QC.CA> wrote:
>
>The command-line interface to cc is part of the ELF standard!?

Of course not.

>There is no reason we couldn't have chosen to, for example, default the
>-R path to be identical to the -L path if no run path is given.  This
>would make the common case work with less confusion and no need for
>additional options, while still leaving the full power available
>for those cases where that default is inappropriate.  Or -R could
>default to all -L options that give absolute paths, or it could default
>-R to -L but warn if a relative path is included.  There are plenty of
>alternatives.

I believe this is what FreeBSD does (minus the warning part).

>In choosing not to do that, the designers of the NetBSD interface (even
>if "designers" only to the extent of choosing which existing
>implementation to adopt) chose to provide the flexibility in a way that
>complicates, rather than simplifying, the common case (of links which
>are to run in the same environment the link is done in).

I am a bit ambivalent about that. I think that defaulting -R to be the
same as -L if -R is not defined, would increase complexity and confuse
the users even more. I would even go as far as to claim that it will
have negative security implications as people become sloppier about run
paths. The other side of the argument is that the naive user can use
-L most of the time and does not even need to know about -R.

Are we the only OS requiring -R?

christos