So you should just try it out somewhere in your build system -- gcc -fno-stack-protector -S -xc - < /dev/null -o /dev/null or something similar, grab the return code -- and that's all you need to do.
we'd always managed to avoid this kind of ugliness, but I guess we have no choice.
Indeed. This hurts many more projects btw, not just us.
What's going to get interesting is when the form that this test takes gets broken by the various distros :-)
The test isn't distro-specific; but I'm sure *some* distro (Gentoo? ;-) ) will break it.
Some expert person want to try out a fix? If not, I guess I will.
With Kbuild it's really easy (just copy the one-liner from the Linux kernel code); but for v2, you'll need to do a little more work (but you can use the same mechanism, of course -- copy on of the cc-option macros and you're fine).
Segher