I’m trying to create a minimal Makefile that builds an executable from a single C-file, and links it with some libray:

LDLIBS = -lbar

.PHONY: all
all: foo

With foo.c present, this will do the following:

$ make
cc     foo.c  -lbar -o foo

Unfortunately, this doesn’t work with modern linkers that try to reduce the dependencies by only linking in libraries that have symbols that were referenced before (that is: in arguments left of the -l...).

The correct invocation should thus be:

cc     foo.c  -o foo -lbar

Checking with make -d, I see that the pattern rule for building executables from C-sources is like this:

%: %.c
    $(LINK.c) $^ $(LOADLIBES) $(LDLIBS) -o $@

Of course I could define my own pattern rule, like so (dumping the deprecated LOADLIBES while there):

%: %.c
    $(LINK.c) $^ -o $@ $(LDLIBS)

but why isn’t this the default?

So my question is: why is LDLIBS not added after the -o ...?
Should I use some other variable for automatically adding libraries?