311236 - Use the GNU linker flag --as-needed

Status: RESOLVED WONTFIX

(NSS :: Build, defect)

Description

[Wan-Teh Chang]

In bug 297802, Julien added the Solaris linker flag
-z ignore to coreconf/SunOS5.mk (rev. 1.18).

I learned today that GNU linker has a --as-needed flag
that is equivalent to -z ignore.  But it seems that
it is a new feature and therefore is not supported
by all versions of GNU ld.  For example, I found that
--as-needed is documented in the ld(1) man page on
Red Hat Enterprise Linux 4 but not in the ld(1) man
page on RHEL 3.

Comment 1

[Jory A. Pratt [:anarchy]]

Attachment: applies to both 1.5.x branch and 2.0 branch

This is a patch for those who are using --as-needed support on linux to have proper linking, the --as-needed is only enabled if LDFLAGS are configured on a linux machine. This does not break anything if --as-needed is not enabled. I just ensures proper linking.

Comment 2

[Nelson Bolyard (seldom reads bugmail)]

Jory, please submit your patch as an ordinary text file, the output of 
cvs diff -u5
and do not compress it before submitting it.  The server is quite capable
of compressing the file itself, and compressing it before submitting it 
defeats all of bugzilla's numerous patch analysis tools.

Comment 3

[Jory A. Pratt [:anarchy]]

Attachment: as-needed

sorry about that ... I normally do not compress my patches but that was for gentoo ( oops ) ... here is a new one.

Comment 4

[Nelson Bolyard (seldom reads bugmail)]

Comment on attachment 250252 [details] [diff] [review]
as-needed

This attachment doesn't appear to be in the right format for a patch, but I'm going to try to set the patch flag on it anyway, just to see how bugzilla will handle it.

Comment 5

[Nelson Bolyard (seldom reads bugmail)]

Jory, did you attach the right patch?
This bug is about NSS, but your patch does not patch any file in NSS.

Comment 6

[Jory A. Pratt [:anarchy]]

(In reply to comment #5)
> Jory, did you attach the right patch?
> This bug is about NSS, but your patch does not patch any file in NSS.
> 

That is cause most distros are using system nss/nspr which makes that patch completely userless. nss/nspr built out side of mozilla products such as firefox/thunderbird have no issues with as-need.

Comment 7

[Jory A. Pratt [:anarchy]]

Attachment: second rpath patch

Here is one of two patches

Comment 8

[Jory A. Pratt [:anarchy]]

Attachment: first as-needed patch which converts to rpath

Both patches convert to rpath wich is porper solution IMHO. it also enabled the proper linking for as-needed

Comment 9

[Jory A. Pratt [:anarchy]]

Attachment: z defintion

Should also be applied for consistancy with the compiler

Comment 10

[BugBot [:suhaib / :marco/ :calixte]]

The bug assignee is inactive on Bugzilla, so the assignee is being reset.