Description of problem: -Wl,--as-needed has the effect of telling the linker to not make a binary pull in libraries it doesn't use/need. This is actually a common thing in the world of pkg-config sadly. The effect of pulling such spurious libraries in is that programs use more memory and take longer to start up. The theoretical downside would be (and this is why it isn't default in ld) that a program could have plugins, where the program links to a library with the sole purpose of providing it to plugins, while the plugins aren't linked to the library. IMO that's broken and in practice this doesn't actually happen (in practice the plugins will link to the library they depend on)
Jakub, thoughts / comments?
--as-needed is a positional switch, which doesn't nest, so the next --no-as-needed which e.g. gcc inserts after -lgcc_s cancels it anyway. Setting this in rpm is IMHO a bad idea, it should be done in pkg-config/libtool, enable it before libraries which aren't necessarily needed and turn it again off after that list.
Despite what you say, adding it to the CFLAGS does have a positive effect; the autoconf/automake packages don't depend on the implicit CFLAGS pickup (which would be before -lgcc_s), but add their own explicit CFLAGS on the gcc command line so it's still in effect. While I don't disagree with your "it should be done in pkg-config".. that's something that was true 3 years ago as well.. but unlikely to change. Adding it to fedora cflags does have a positive effect... do you see any negative effects?
Anyone got any objections to just adding this?
Changing version to '9' as part of upcoming Fedora 9 GA. More information and reason for this action is here: http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/BugZappers/HouseKeeping
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Fedora 9 changed to end-of-life (EOL) status on 2009-07-10. Fedora 9 is no longer maintained, which means that it will not receive any further security or bug fix updates. As a result we are closing this bug. If you can reproduce this bug against a currently maintained version of Fedora please feel free to reopen this bug against that version. Thank you for reporting this bug and we are sorry it could not be fixed.