Loving ld with --as-needed

[Mike Hearn]

On Mon, 28 Feb 2005 18:25:54 +0000, Mike Hearn wrote:
> But it's not, so I'm guessing there is some reason why it's got to be
> enabled explicitly. If you like I'll ask the binutils guys, otherwise you
> can do it. I would like to know for other reasons anyway.

Alan Modra said this:

"Code supporting --as-needed is relatively new and quite complicated.
It is likely to have bugs.  Also, some projects might rely on the
existing ld behaviour of always adding DT_NEEDED tags for shared
libraries."


So I guess it's safe to switch on, as I suspect very few programs rely on
DT_NEEDED being available when no symbols are used, and building Ubuntu
with this switch will be a good way to find out the scale of the backwards
compatibility problem. And the code will get lots of testing :)

thanks -mike