Change to DSO-linking semantics of the compiler

[Adam Williamson]

On Tue, 2010-01-12 at 01:59 +0100, Milos Jakubicek wrote:

> Also I have really doubts what concerns upstreamability of the necessary 
> changes in packages. Especially if other distributions will (???) 
> continue shipping ld with the traditional semantics, this means hours of 
> headache discussions with upstream not willing to accept the patch.

I may be misunderstanding, but I believe this is the same thing Mandriva
refers to as underlinking:

http://wiki.mandriva.com/en/Underlinking

if so, Mandriva has been enforcing the fixing of this type of error for
a couple of years now (by having --as-needed and --no-undefined in the
default ld flags). This has a few implications:

a) yes, it clearly is practical to maintain a distro this way
b) in many cases where a Fedora package has this problem, it'll be
possible to take a patch from Mandriva
c) some upstreams will be used to dealing with this, since it's been
brought up by Mandriva

I did upstream several underlinking patches I wrote while maintaining
Mandriva packages; I didn't have any problems getting upstreams to
accept them. If they weren't already aware of why it was a good idea to
fix underlinking issues, they always understood after being pointed to
the Mandriva Wiki page.

I believe Debian's checking scripts also note underlinking issues as a
'warning'-type thing (i.e. they notify the packager and suggest it
should be fixed, but don't fail the build). IMBW on that one, though.
-- 
Adam Williamson
Fedora QA Community Monkey
IRC: adamw | Fedora Talk: adamwill AT fedoraproject DOT org
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