Re: How to convince maintainer to use --as-needed?
Dmitry Smirnov <onlyjob@member.fsf.org> writes:
> I seek your advice regarding the best practice with using --as-needed.
> Recently I tried to convince two package maintainers to use --as-needed
> in order to reduce overlinking. Surprisingly this time this idea was
> opposed with great resistance as none of maintainers but me had previous
> experience with -- as-needed.
> Because in their eyes I have neither expertise nor reputation I couldn't
> convince them that benefits are outweight risks. (--as-needed removes
> dozen of packages from Depends)
> I've been asked to provide a document or a quote from reputable DD
> regarding using --as-needed as recommended practice in Debian, if such.
I use --as-needed for all of my packages that do excessive shared library
linking, including some of my own when avoiding that inside the upstream
build system was excessively complex. It works great.
I don't like having it be the default (as it is in Ubuntu), but as an
option for the packager, it is quite frequently exactly the right tool.
For several of those packages, I used to maintain complex and annoying
local patches and workarounds to relink binaries with the correct
dependencies, changes that upstream was completely uninterested in since
from their perspective there was no upside and it just made the build
system more fragile. I was able to drop a ton of that cruft by switching
over to --as-needed.
For packages that use Automake and Libtool, dh-autoreconf makes using the
flag very easy.
--
Russ Allbery (rra@debian.org) <http://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/>
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