Announcing `gold-rebuild' - link your packages with gold now

[Michal Nowak]

Past months I spent investigating `gold' - the new GNU linker
and how it now works with stock Fedora packages.

Result is `gold-rebuild', Bash script which automates `gold's 
involvement in Mock buildroot. Tarball can be obtained here:
http://mnowak.fedorapeople.org/gold-rebuild/dist/

What it can do for you? You give it package name or comps group
to rebuild and it downloads binutils daily snapshot, incorporates
it into latest Rawhide binutils SRPM and builds it with `gold' 
instead of usual `ld' as a /usr/bin/ld. Such resulting RPM packages
are placed in local repository and are used in Mock later when 
building (linking) you selected package or comps group.

Documentation lives here:
https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/GoldLinking

Script has its limitations and catches but should work fine at i686
and x86_64 (PPC seems to be broken) on Fedora 12 and 13.

So far when rebuilding Base group: TOTAL: 99 PASS: 84 FAIL: 15
See attachment for complete list. Regarding fails, they are being
classified by the script so you can easily figure out, where might
be the problem (GCC v. gold v. fedora). It would be wise to contact
your package upstream with patches regarding gold-instead-of-ld usage.
Regarding passes: It just says package can be compiled and linked by 
gold. No one`s claiming the binaries are 100% OK and working :)
(in sources testsuite such as prelink claims it might not ~ but prelink
is likely special case).

Let me know if you came across bugs in this script or you think
it should have some sort of improvement you need.

Michal