Adam Jackson wrote: > Ideally, all libraries should report zero unused direct dependencies > when inspected with ldd -r -u. Although in some sense unused libraries > are harmless, they do put needless pressure on the kernel's VM since all > processes linked with the affected libraries have to map many more > files, and in principle you can get unexpected behaviour when symbols > don't resolve the way you expect due to namespace collisions. > > Several of the core X libraries fail this, for not particularly good > reasons. I've fixed most of them by now, but there's one or two > stragglers still. > > The side effect of this is that the culled libraries will not be > included in the linker search scope for any libraries or applications > above them in the stack. For example, libXaw no longer links against > libSM, so if your application linked against libXaw and not libSM, but > used symbols from libSM, it may now fail at runtime claiming that some > symbols could not be resolved. If this happens, the affected package > needs to be fixed to link against all appropriate libraries directly. > > I doubt anyone will actually run into that, but I wanted to give a heads > up in case it does happen. > > (Ideally we should be able to do this for the entire OS. Baby steps.) > > - ajax > How about using ld --as-needed, AFAIK that has come up before and would be a great improvement! Whats holding us back from linking with --as-needed by default? Regards, Hans
