Auditing the menuconfig help entries.

[Bernhard Reutner-Fischer]

On Sun, Aug 24, 2008 at 06:56:44PM -0500, Rob Landley wrote:
>Fiddling with menuconfig:
>
>DOPIC (Create only position independent code)
>
>  Does not say why you would or wouldn't want to do this.  (Does it generate
>  position independent code and non-position independent code?  Should the .a
>  files also be PIC, or just the .so files?  If you select this are you
>  telling it _not_ to generate any .a files, so static linking isn't an
>  option?  Is there a downside to statically linking PIC code?)

Building pic code into an .a doesn't make sense to me.
Anyway. If you're lucky (and e.g. on i386), it's possible to get away
without pic even for .so. Don't try that at home unless you know exactly
what you're doing.


>LINUXTHREADS_OLD:
>
>  Ok, what does this currently mean?  This selects the old libpthreads
>  implementation from the dawn of time, but what's the alternative?  The new
>  NPTL stuff hasn't been merged yet, so this intermediate version is... what?

OLD means the old version. !OLD is something newer. !UCLIBC_HAS_THREADS
is what i do and the rest is a myth.

>  (And while we're at it, what does this mean:
>  ./libpthread/linuxthreads.old/sysdeps/x86_64/pt-machine.h:39: warning:
>  register used for two global register variables )

Which versions of binutils and gcc? DOMULTI set in configure?
>
>UCLIBC_HAS_STUBS
>
>  This is just "fork on nommu", right?  Shouldn't it be under nommu sypport
>  and depend on it?

The additional comment is a bit misleading. Initially i ment it to just
be the first paragraph with s/impossible/impossible or unwarranted/

>UCLIBC_BUILD_RELRO
>UCLIBC_BUILD_NOW
>
>  There are no help entries for these, and no _clue_ why one defaults to on
>  and the other off.

man ld