--as-needed compile option?

[Arjan van de Ven]

On Thu, Mar 31, 2005 at 09:23:42AM -0500, Dan Williams wrote:
> On Thu, 2005-03-31 at 15:34 +0200, Arjan van de Ven wrote:
> > we've looked at this; one of the problems is that this needs to be a per
> > package thing; there are valid setups where --as-needed breaks (eg apps
> > that have plugins can break).
> 
> What kind of stuff do they do that breaks?  I assume that apps that use
> dlopen() have error checking for it.  Are we talking about weak-linking
> here or something? (weak linking AIUI == ld not resolving symbols until
> they are actually used)

the most obvious bad case is where a program links to a lib in order to have
plugins use functionality from those libs, but where the program itself
doesn't use any functions from the lib.