On Sun, Dec 09, 2007, Zack Weinberg wrote: > I have in the past argued for --as-needed to be made the default in > upstream binutils; that's how safe I think it is. (Upstream > maintainers, conscious of the above and other (isomorphic) corner > cases, wanted a distribution to try it on a large scale first. Thus I > am very happy to see Debian experimenting with it.) > > I'm curious what prompted your message. Did a program you use > actually break? What was the failure mode?
When this was added to pkg-gnome at large, we were hit by at least toolchain issues on some arches (was it hppa?) -- now fixed -- and also got some borken packages. I think gnome-panel / gnome-applets and gedit were the two packages that were hit when we added --as-needed. I think in both cases it was something like the main binary being linked to many utility libraries (because it was easy to link it to everything which configure found), and then the plugin calling directly into these libs, but not being linked to them. If the main binary didn't actually use the libs, these were stripped out, and then the dlopening of the plugins would fail. These were really issues in the build process, issues which would have been caught with -z defs before --as-needed (which is why I'm advocating usage of -z defs before --as-needed), but slipped silently in the end package and actually hit users. I don't think there's an insanely strong incentive to make --as-needed the default or to not make it; distros such as Debian and Gentoo are using it wildly at the moment; it just can point out some surprize bugs in my experience. HTH, -- Loïc Minier -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact [EMAIL PROTECTED]
