--as-needed compile option?

[Harald Hoyer]

Arjan van de Ven wrote:
> 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. 
> 

And why does the plugin not link to the libs?