Re: dpkg-shlibdeps: warning: dependency on.... (they use none of its symbols)

["Bernhard R. Link" <brlink@debian.org>]

* Yavor Doganov <yavor@gnu.org> [090324 12:13]:
> The keyword here is "before".  There were bugs in binutils exposed on
> some architectures, especially for C++ linking.  Maybe new architectures
> like armel are still problematic in some cases.  The problem Bernhard
> Link describes has been resolved upstream:
>
> http://sourceware.org/ml/binutils/2009-01/msg00413.html

|(elf_link_add_object_symbols): Link in --as-needed libs if they
| satisfy undefined symbols in other libs.

I'm not into bfd enough to understand what it actually does, but both things
I can imagine would be another argument against using it:

1) if it means to not remove libraries that suplies symbols that another library
   needs but that library is not linking to suplying library

In this case it has nothing to do with the example I gave, because this only
makes a difference if a library does not link to all the libraries it needs,
which was not the case in my example.

2) if it means to not remove a library that is already needed by a library needed

In this case --as-needed would still produce warnings in dpkg-shlibdeps
for the harmless case (a program linking in dependencies of its libraries to
support static linking), while it would silence warnings for the cases you
would want to know about: linking against libraries not used at all.
(Because in this case either something is very strange with the build-system
or the "no used at all" is not really true).

Hochachtungsvoll,
	Bernhard R. Link