Does binutils really harm other ports?

[Rainer Müller]

On 2013-01-09 23:33, Brandon Allbery wrote:
> The binutils linker tends to be out of step with Apple's linker:  expect
> major problems on ML and likely some problems on Lion still, especially
> if there hasn't been a release that picked up the changes in their repo.
> 
> You might install it and move its ld out of the way.

At least on my Mac OS X 10.8.2 Mountain Lion there is no linker
installed by the binutils @2.21 port. AFAIK, most tools of the GNU
binutils only target ELF, so it would not be useful for development for
Mac OS X anyway.

The tickets prompting the addition of this note are describing problems
that some ports failed with binutils active due to use of the GNU
assembler which does not produce Mach-O output:

https://trac.macports.org/ticket/22681
https://trac.macports.org/ticket/24617

At least on my system, there is no /opt/local/bin/gas installed by binutils.

Rainer