Re: -Wl,--as-needed considered possibly harmful

[Michael Poole <mdpoole@troilus.org>]

Stephen Gran writes:

> This one time, at band camp, Michael Poole said:
>> What happens for a user who (however absurd or insane he might be to
>> try this with gtk+) tries to link his application statically?
>> 
>> Perhaps the "absurd and wrong" part is that pkg-config does not
>> provide a way to distinguish between use cases, and that the name for
>> the current behavior should also be --static-libs rather than --libs,
>> but there is a good reason to provide the transitive closure of
>> dependencies for a package *somewhere* in pkg-config.
>
> That is supported in pkg-config, but no upstream I've ever met seems to
> understand it yet.

Ah, I see.  I overlooked the --static flag to pkg-config because (case
in point) "pkg-config --libs gtk+-2.0" only misses seven of the
libraries that the --static version uses.  I would guess this is
because "Requires.private" is not mentioned in the pkg-config man
page.  At least on my system, Libs.private seems to be used correctly
by most or all .pc files, but Requires.private use is spotty.

Thank you for highlighting that.

Michael Poole