Subject: Re: [bug#55998] [PATCH] gnu: Add cctools.

From: Philip McGrath <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 17 Jun 2022 07:28:48 -0400

On Wednesday, June 15, 2022 4:07:47 PM EDT Maxime Devos wrote:
> Philip McGrath schreef op wo 15-06-2022 om 15:19 [-0400]:
> > Still, several of the tools are useful (albeit niche) on their own,
> > which is why I sent this patch now. A whole group of tools supports
> > inspecting Mach-O binaries, for example.
> 
> Ok, but the package description is implying a linker is available,
> which is not the case, due to the lack of a Darwin libc in Guix.
> 

Concretely, there is an `ld`, and it runs at least enough to print out a usage 
note.

I can't say for certain *why* it works, though the way LLVM doesn't need a 
different binary for each target and the somewhat unusual way linking to libc 
and other system libraries works on Darwin. Though does a linker really need a 
libc? In principle, it could link things that don't link to libc, or even link 
libc itself.

I haven't tried actually linking anything with this package's `ld`, but, even 
if it turns out to not be fully functional yet, this is the package that 
contains Darwin's `ld`.

I did tweak the description in v2 to replace the reference to `libtool`, 
because Darwin's `libtool` is something completely unrelated than the program 
in the Guix package called `libtool`.

-Philip