Base X11 libraries cleanup

Adam Jackson ajackson at redhat.com
Fri Jun 30 13:58:02 UTC 2006


Hans de Goede wrote:
> How about using ld --as-needed, AFAIK that has come up before and would
> be a great improvement!
> 
> Whats holding us back from linking with --as-needed by default?

Well, one, libtool will actively defeat your attempts to use it, since 
it doesn't think linker arguments are positional, so it sorts 
-Wl,--as-needed (and -Wl,* in general) to the end, _after_ all the 
libraries you could possibly want to have specified as optional.  Which 
means the libtool developers are either clueless or malicious.

No, I'm not interested in fixing libtool, other than by replacement.

In general though, since --as-needed is positional, it's not as simple 
as "just turn it on by default", because you have to do it between all 
the convenience libraries you ar'd up during the build, and all the 
installed system libraries you might possibly want to link against. 
Even if you do that, there's no guarantee the app isn't doing something 
weird like using the result of dlopen(NULL) to dlsym with, in which case 
the altered search scope can affect runtime behaviour.

It's fine to add it if you're willing to fix what breaks _and_ you're 
not using libtool.

- ajax




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