translation of command line arguments (was: New auxiliary archive script)

[Ralf Wildenhues]

* Peter Rosin wrote on Fri, Aug 13, 2010 at 11:38:43AM CEST:
> Den 2010-08-12 19:55 skrev Ralf Wildenhues:
> > Same with 'compile' by the way.  If -O3 is spelt differently for cl,
> > then I think translating that is a good idea.

> I think we should keep such translation to a bare minimum. The chance
> of options clashing is just too high, and that will cause end user
> confusion.
*snip more good points*

> Also, there aren't going to be perfect matches for most options anyway.
> It's just a losing game. And to further add to the burden, the translation
> is likely to be dependent on compiler version.

All good points.  Thanks.

On the other hand, this means that better support for cl means adjusting
a number of macros from Autoconf, Gnulib, and maybe Automake as well.
For example, what about dependency tracking?  Does the current code
enable msvcmsys or msvisualcpp depmode if --enable-dependency-tracking
is specified?  Your "MSVC status" post on libtool-patches doesn't tell.

> -g does not mean anything to cl, which is fortunate. Unfortunately it only
> prints a warning on stderr, so the autoconf test thinks it's ok to use it
> which means that you get that warning all over the place unless you help
> the -g test or override CFLAGS manually.
> 
> cl : Command line warning D9002 : ignoring unknown option '-g'
> 
> There is autoconf code to look for output on stderr when testing if -g is
> a viable option, but unfortunately cl always outputs a logo on stderr,
> unless you feed it -nologo, so the autoconf test only works if you set
> CC="cl -nologo".
> 
> Given that the stderr code seems to have been added to autoconf in response
> to a cl report, that code seems rather broken...

Hmpf.  Not sure what to do; for the moment an addition to install.texi
to specify CC="cl -nologo" CFLAGS= would probably be prudent.

Cheers,
Ralf