It's unclear why this was added originally, but assuming it was needed
20 years ago, it shouldn't be explicitly required nowadays. Current
versions of autotools already take care of exporting LDFLAGS to the
Makefile as needed (things are actually getting linked). That's why
the configure diffs show LDFLAGS still here, but shifted to a diff
place in the output list. A few dirs stop exporting LDFLAGS, but
that's because they don't do any linking, only compiling, so it's
correct.
As for the use of $ldflags instead of the standard $LDFLAGS, I can't
really explain that at all. Just use the right name so users don't
have to dig into why their setting isn't respected, and then use a
non-standard name instead. Adjust the testsuite to match.
Since automake already sets per-library CCASFLAGS to $(AM_CCASFLAGS)
by default, there's no need to explicitly set it here.
Many of these dirs don't have .S files in the first place, so the rule
doesn't even do anything. That can easily be seen when Makefile.in has
no changes as a result.
For the dirs with .S files, the custom rules are the same as the pattern
.S.o rules, so this is a nice cleanup.
The only dir that was adding extra flags (newlib/libc/machine/mn10300/)
to the per-library setting can have it moved to the global AM_CCASFLAGS
since the subdir only has one target. Although the setting just adds
extra debugging flags, so maybe it should be deleted in general.
There are a few dirs that we leave the redundant setting in place. This
is to workaround an automake limitation in subdirs that support building
with & w/out libtool:
https://www.gnu.org/software/automake/manual/html_node/Objects-created-both-with-libtool-and-without.html
This matches what the other GNU toolchain projects have done already.
The generated diff in practice isn't terribly large. This will allow
more use of subdir local.mk includes due to fixes & improvements that
came after the 1.11 release series.
The newlib & libgloss dirs are already generated using autoconf-2.69.
To avoid merging new code and/or accidental regeneration using diff
versions, leverage config/override.m4 to pin to 2.69 exactly. This
matches what gcc/binutils/gdb are already doing.
The README file already says to use autoconf-2.69.
To accomplish this, it's just as simple as adding -I flags to the
top-level config/ dir when running aclocal. This is because the
override.m4 file overrides AC_INIT to first require the specific
autoconf version before calling the real AC_INIT.
Since automake deprecated the INCLUDES name in favor of AM_CPPFLAGS,
change all existing users over. The generated code is the same since
the two variables have been used in the same exact places by design.
There are other cleanups to be done, but lets focus on just renaming
here so we can upgrade to a newer automake version w/out triggering
new warnings.
Mike Frysinger
Jon Turney
Jeff Johnston