[Issue 7044] Missing a way to control the order of arguments passed to the linker makes impossible to link some programs

[via Digitalmars-d-bugs]

https://issues.dlang.org/show_bug.cgi?id=7044

--- Comment #51 from Martin Nowak <code at dawg.eu> ---
I think requiring a `-confsection` switch limits the usefulness a lot.

One reason for the extended ini format is that we can make the linking
configurable for certain targets, e.g. m32coff or msvc14 (see
[here](https://github.com/D-Programming-Language/druntime/pull/1341#issuecomment-129163526))
without hardcoding those rules in the compiler. This gives packagers the
necessary control to adapt dmd to every platform and provide some extras, such
as a debug phobos library. Currently it's not possible to select a debug phobos
lib solely by `-debug`. We have similar requirements for `m32coff` and VS2015.

The other reason is similar but focused on letting the user select different
configurations.
This is already solved by the `-conf=` switch, but having the compiler match
sections would reduce the necessary number of dmd.conf files.

We already have a proved implementation to select configurations based on
compiler flags and targets.
http://code.dlang.org/package-format?lang=json#build-settings
Matching "version" identifiers is a generic solution that's both simple and
flexible, e.g. it readily allows to match `[Environment-D_HardFloat-ARM_Thumb]`
or `[Environment-linux-D_NoBoundsChecks-D_InlineAsm_X86_64]`. Maybe we don't
need that much flexibility but
`Environment32/Environment64/Environment32mscoff` already don't scale with a
adding a second orthogonal switch for
[MSVC14](https://github.com/D-Programming-Language/druntime/pull/1341#issuecomment-129168177).

> I agree, but I'd like to try this out first to see what the common usage patterns will be, and then adding those later. If we add them now, we may wind up with a bunch of useless clutter that we cannot remove because we don't want to break legacy makefiles.

That's a noble effort, but it's already clear that user selected config
sections aren't the right solution to ship a debug/profile/msvc14 phobos
variant.
Also trying to find out usage patterns by providing an inferior feature is
flawed, because you don't necessarily get feedback and it might get less or
different acceptance as the real feature.
In this case the requirements are already know, so if you want to know the
usage patterns just ask the packagers that need to deal with dmd.conf
limitations.

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