Apparently this code was originally introduced in 2005 by 8de3367.

I don't have any familiarity with AIX, so I'll just assume that this change is the right thing to do... @petk Do you have any input here?

In d4fd9a5, Makefile.global was change to read the extension name by reading in the $dlname field from the libtool .la file in PHP_MODULES make variable. This worked on all platforms but aix, darwin, and netware since those platforms did not have suffix=la in the PHP_SHARED_MODULE macro:

It's likely that this was broken on these platforms before, because this line only works when the extension is .la:

'extension='`basename $(PHP_MODULES) .la`'.so'

This same issue was fixed for macOS in e46cd60 bug report and netware was never fixed, but rather support was removed in 2104bea.

Hello, thanks for the patch. I think it sounds good to go. The .la files for libtool contain such info, yes so the .so files are wrong from how I understand that this should work. Probably no one has noticed this until now is because it fails only on the make test step. The .so files are binary files without things like dlname in them. Moving the shared objects at the end is from my understanding not needed, because these files get copied to such places elsewhere, so the fix is ok.

The '$3'/$1.la part is the same as [$]@ for all other systems (maybe we can sync that also here for AIX).

So, in the end, the only thing special and different for AIX systems is that -Wl,-G linker option. Probably it's needed for AIX systems.

The '$3'/$1.la part is the same as [$]@ for all other systems (maybe we can sync that also here for AIX).

I kind of figured that would work, but I was not sure (not a Makefile wizard). Due to the -Wl,-G option difference the two cases couldn't easily be combined, so I didn't bother checking.

So, in the end, the only thing special and different for AIX systems is that -Wl,-G linker option. Probably it's needed for AIX systems.

Yes, the -G enables a bunch of AIX ld features related to run-time linking.

Do you think it would be worthwhile to attempt to merge these two cases in some way since they only differ by that one flag? Perhaps we could just append the -Wl,-G to the end of the string instead of in the middle. This would prevent users from overriding the settings in $(EXTRA_LDFLAGS). I'm not sure that's a good or bad thing, though.

Yes, we can simplify that switch. Maybe something like this should work ok:

  case $host_alias in
    *aix*[)]
      additionalFlags="-Wl,-G"
      ;;
  esac

  link_cmd='$(LIBTOOL) --mode=link ifelse($4,,[$(CC)],[$(CXX)]) $(COMMON_FLAGS) $(CFLAGS_CLEAN) $(EXTRA_CFLAGS) $(LDFLAGS) '$additionalFlags' -o [$]@ -export-dynamic -avoid-version -prefer-pic -module -rpath $(phplibdir) $(EXTRA_LDFLAGS) $($2) $(translit($1,a-z_-,A-Z__)_SHARED_LIBADD)'

Thank you @kadler, applied via 700f876 to PHP-7.2 and up.