Hi everybody,

I passed this on gentoo-alt and seemed to be ok for everyone, as it doesn't 
change anything for the end users on Gentoo Linux and is the minimum change 
possible.

As you can find on Gentoo/ALT maintainers notes [1] under "Linkers issues", 
Gentoo/ALT is moving toward accepting non-GNU linkers (while not asking 
anyone to support them).

The new handling is basically the same as it was before, just instead of 
hardcoding -Wl,-z,now as flags, it's asked to use $(bindnow-flags) function 
to get the flags to use. The function is provided by flag-o-matic, so it's 
already there if you're append-flags'ing.

There are also instructions on how to patch sources that use autotools and a 
suggested way to patch sources that do not use them.

The gentooalt-m4 package that is named in the guide is currently only present
on Gentoo/ALT overlay. I'm going to do a few more tests tomorrow, and later 
I'll see to commit it on main portage. Using that instead of adding the m4 to 
every package makes possible to update just that one to add support for a new 
linker.

I'm not going to open a big bug for this, as it's going to be quite tricky and 
it's mostly a side or "will be" problem, that is less subtle than others 
(like the --with-gnu-ld) as it causes the package to fail linking and it's 
simple to tackle when keywording or reviewing or testing.

If anybody feels like fixing that in its own packages, however, it's 
welcome :)

[1] http://www.gentoo.org/proj/en/gentoo-alt/maintnotes.xml#doc_chap3
-- 
Diego "Flameeyes" Pettenò - http://dev.gentoo.org/~flameeyes/
Gentoo/ALT lead, Gentoo/FreeBSD, Video, AMD64, Sound, PAM, KDE