Bug#319162: NMU patch

[Loïc Minier]

        Hi,

On Sun, Sep 04, 2005, Steve Langasek wrote:
> Yes, library dependencies are a major concern of mine, as I wrote at
> <http://people.debian.org/~vorlon/dependency-hell/>.  But two design
> kludges don't make a good solution, as they say (paraphrased); I believe
> this is a problem we need to be fixing at the root, which is libtool and
> pkg-config, instead of painting over it.

 I think everyone agrees that if the deps generated by usage of libtool
 and pkg-config were smaller, there would be less use for --as-needed.

 Still, I find there's no reason to be strongly against --as-needed for
 now:
 - libtool's upstream never shipped with the modifications you suggest,
   but binutils did ship --as-needed, and it borke on not very common
   arches; this lets me think the amount of testing each feature
   received is comparable, and --as-needed isn't that experimental --
   even libtool people look at it for future usage
 - the required libtool's changes are shipped in Debian, and in Debian
   only, and until they're shipped upstream, the amount of work it would
   take to upload each source relibtoolized is insane; --as-needed is
   trivial to add/remove and doesn't add work between upstream releases
 - the libtool fix only affects libtool generated packages

 While these are all obvious conclusions from the discussions, I'm
 surprized people stand so firmly pro or against --as-needed.

 binutils has a regression which has to be fixed, to my knowledge a fix
 is ready (the testsuite changes are missing though), and since we need
 to be able to build packages to allow some testing transitions right
 now, we're removing the build-option on packages needing
 uploads/builds for these transitions.

 As I understand it:

 very short term
 - remove --as-needed each time this is required to help an ongoing
   important transition

 short term
 - finish the binutils fix, and return to the situation where we can and
   we use --as-needed because the libtool and pkg-config issues remain

 medium term
 - fix upstream libtool and pkg-config


 Only time will show whether --as-needed is often unusable and breaks on
 random arches, and hence should be dropped, or in the contrary that
 libtool and pkg-config were not fixed and that --as-needed is stable
 enough.


PS: Steve, I've followed you bringing the libtool issue upstream, thank
you for that, but I couldn't find any hints on your claims against
pkg-config and how it should be fixed, nor a Debian bug; I was however
pointed at the reversal of an "indirect deps" change because of
complaints.  Do you have any pointer on this?  Are you bringing this
upstream too?
-- 
Loïc Minier <lool at dooz.org>