Hello everyone, I'm sure at least half of you are thinking "Oh no, not this again...", and I agree. However, I'm /also/ thinking "Why the heck haven't we done this yet?"
We've been discussing this since 2008, and probably waaay before that too. The entire discussion about whether we should do this or not has already passed, there is NO NEED to have that again. This email is about discussion on what all is *left* before we can do $SUBJECT. What prompted this email? libpng-1.4 and many other upgrades that have left gentoo systems very very broken. We have to resort to random scripts to fix breakage, which reflects very badly on us. Even worse, a lot of users just give up and reinstall their system, or don't upgrade, or just move away from Gentoo. I understand that these kind of breakages are inevitable, but with as-needed, we can reduce their effect *drastically*. Instead of having to rebuild almost their entire system, the user would only need to rebuild packages that directly link(ed) to libpng. I honestly think that we cannot afford to expose our users to any more such upgrades without as-needed in the default linux profile. There's a tracker bug for this, and the problems still remaining are: http://bugs.gentoo.org/showdependencytree.cgi?id=129413&hide_resolved=1 *Most* of the problems listed there are forced-as-needed problems, which need to be fixed no doubt, but should NOT block addition of --as-needed to LDFLAGS in make.defaults which will not trigger those build failures. What needs to be done now is for someone with lots of CPU power to grab the list of packages[1], and build them one-by-one (all versions), adding to a new list all the ebuilds that fail. How to test: LDFLAGS="-Wl,--as-needed" emerge -v1 $atom Once we have the list that fails with normal as-needed, we can fix them, get the fix upstreamed (if possible), and switch the flag on. This action should probably be accompanied by a news item informing users about the change, and encouraging them to report the (rare) bug which might hit them. Let's try to make Gentoo less frustrating for our users. 1. http://dev.gentoo.org/~nirbheek/files/as-needed-failures.list -- ~Nirbheek Chauhan Gentoo GNOME+Mozilla Team
