Bug 541808

Summary:	USE flags pic and pie are double
Product:	Gentoo Linux	Reporter:	Thibaud CANALE <thican>
Component:	[OLD] Unspecified	Assignee:	Gentoo Toolchain Maintainers <toolchain>
Status:	RESOLVED INVALID
Severity:	normal
Priority:	Normal
Version:	unspecified
Hardware:	All
OS:	Linux
Whiteboard:
Package list:		Runtime testing required:	---

Description Thibaud CANALE 2015-03-01 15:01:33 UTC

Hello everyone,

Just an enhancement request, could we please merge the USE flags "pic" and "pie" together?

From what I know and understand, PIC stands for “Position Independent Code” and PIE for “Position Independent Executable”, which mean the same behaviour, based on https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Position-independent_code

Maybe those two USE flags have different purposes, but they look like to act as the same, based on gcc(1) for -fPIC and -fPIE descriptions.

Thanks for your support.

Comment 1 SpanKY gentoo-dev

2015-03-03 03:54:22 UTC

they do not mean the same thing.  PIC is typically used to control TEXTRELs in shared libraries on arches (like x86) where the memory overhead is less important than the speed gains.  PIE is used to control whether all executables are PIEs.