ac_compile

[Haefelinger, Wolfgang]

Hello there,

I'm working with the beloved 'Autoconf version 2.13'.
However there is, among others, a detail which I do
not  understand:  In acgeneral.m4, line 1232  the variable
$ac_compile to compile a C source file contains hard-wired
the flag '-c' to avoid  the final linking pass. How do you
know that "all C compilers" support this flag? 

My  naive  assumption  was that the flag -c gets added to
the variable $CFLAGS. 

I was even more surprised to see that the variable $ac_link
contains $CPPFLAGS as well as $CFLAGS. I do  not understand
why we  need the flags to the preprocessor here? Again your
assumption  is  that  the  'C' compiler can be used to link
objects  into  an executable. Although this is true for all 
the compiler I'm aware of, it is not true in general.

Bye,
Wolfgang.
 
 _Wolfgang Haefelinger________________________
 voice: 069-263-16582 
 email: address@hidden