g++ linker: behaviour change

I was working late on a Friday night, setting up an Ubuntu 12.04 machine. Final step was compiling a couple of C++ programs, that worked fine on Ubuntu 10.04, 11.04 and Centos 5. I got linker complaints regarding boost::program_options. Sounded like it wasn't installed. Strange, as I'd installed "libboost-all-dev".

Poke around... all the files seem to be there. The lib files are in /usr/lib/. Surely g++ is already looking there, but I added "-L/usr/lib/" to be sure. No help. I'd tried all the various ideas I found on StackOverflow, until eventually I found http://stackoverflow.com/a/11250976/841830 where "panickal" suggested the list of libraries has to come last. Yeah sure. But getting desperate by this point I give it a try... and it works!

Specifically, in my Makefile, I had to change this line:
    $(TARGET): $(OBJS)
        $(CXX) -s $(LDFLAGS) $(OBJS) -o $@

To look like this:
    $(TARGET): $(OBJS)
        $(CXX) -s $(OBJS) -o $@ $(LDFLAGS)

So somewhere between g++ 4.5.2 and g++ 4.6.3 it has gone from being easy-going and taking parameters in any order, to requiring certain ones to come at the end. A strange evolution. (I understand why the ordering amongst the library files matters, I just don't see why they now have to all go together at the end.)

But luckily I was using a Makefile with some structure, so the fix was trivial, and my Friday night did not become a Saturday morning!