vanilla build of 7.7p1 release on linux/4.17 fails with gcc8 @ "/usr/bin/ld: unrecognized option '-Wl,-z,retpolineplt'"

[Colin Watson]

On Fri, Jun 08, 2018 at 07:25:13AM -0700, PGNet Dev wrote:
> The build certainly works if
> 
> 	unset LD
> 
> or
> 
> 	LD=gcc
> 
> so it's certainly not untenable; just a bit befuddling it you've got LD=ld
> in use.
> 
> I'm curious as to what's unique/new here -- as I've typically got LD=ld set
> (by env) for other builds, and don't see this problem.

I think the bug is really just in OpenSSH trying to use $(LD) to link
program executables rather than $(CC).  The latter is normal practice in
most build systems I see these days, and anything else is incompatible
with the common practice of putting the GCC-style -Wl,... in LDFLAGS
combined with the expectation that it should be possible to set LD=ld.

Debian sets LDFLAGS=-Wl,-z,relro by default if you use a reasonably
modern version of its package build helper tools.  While it's not
unheard of for packages to fail due to linking with ld rather than gcc
and for us to need to override this, it's rare.

That said, I'm not sure why you felt the need to explicitly set LD=ld;
generally speaking, either that's the default already, or it will break
stuff as it does here.

-- 
Colin Watson                                       [cjwatson at debian.org]