POLA.. missing --sysroot option in ld?

In our 8.0 based systems at $JOB our build environment made heavy use 
of the --sysroot option in gcc and ld.

We are trying to move up to a newer release but suddenly the --sysroot 
option has disappeared.

we get the message "/usr/bin/ld: this linker was not configured to use 
sysroots"

Does anyone know what happened?  and when, and by who?
I have looked in the Makefiles and configuration files in SVN and I 
can't see a change that would have done this..
of course the building of these tools is rather complex so I may have 
missed some place..

julian