Newer versions of binutils ship with wrappers for "ar" "ranlib" and "nm". They start with "gcc-" and can handle plugins, which is atm only the lto plugin. I know lto isn't supported by gentoo at the moment, but this request is about infrastructure which should be there some time ahead. This plugin aware binutils helpers are needed when linking against a static library containing only "GIMPLE" objects, these are objects that have been created with -fno-fat-lto-objects. This speeds up the build process a lot. There are quite a lot of packages out there using static libraries during build, they will fail to link if those wrappers wont, but the -fno-fat-lto-objects, will be used. Reproducible: Always Steps to Reproduce: 1. set CFLAGS to "-flto -fno-fat-lto-objects" 2. set LDFLAGS to "-O2 -flto" 3. build wget and watch it fail with loads of unresolved symbols.
(According to the toolchain people, you should be using binutils-config instead.)
`eselect binutils` is a wrapper around binutils-config now *** This bug has been marked as a duplicate of bug 494228 ***
