binutils: -z defs ld flag breaks gnome-settings-daemon on IA-64

[Jonathan Nieder]

# apparently the bug is that the resulting gnome-settings-daemon is
# unusable, which would be grave (and is currently expressed as a bug
# in gnome-settings-daemon, but I leave that to others to figure out)
severity 620874 grave
quit

Hi,

Émeric Maschino wrote:

> What's unclear to me:
> - is this issue limited to gnome-settings-daemon or does it reveal
> something more serious and other packages built with -z defs flag are
> affected too (hence this bug report)?
> - if other packages are affected too, is this issue specific to IA-64 or not?

-z defs means to disallow undefined symbols in object files.  Are you
sure that there is not some undefined symbol in an object file and
this is not build system/runtime behavior fallout from that?

> From http://www.debian.org/Bugs/Developer#severities, I've set bug
> severity to critical, as ld breaks an unrelated software
> (gnome-settings-daemon in the present case).

Obviously they are not unrelated. :)  ld is the linker used to build
gnome-settings-daemon, and the bug (wherever it is) manifests itself at
build time.

> By the way, with currently broken gnome-settings-daemon-2.30.2-2 and
> gdm3 window manager, CPU power is completely eaten by running
> instances of gnome-settings-daemon. Even worse, each time a user logs
> in/off, additional gnome-settings-daemon processes are forked, leading
> to a completely unusable system.

These are symptoms and do not in themselves sound like something a
linker would do.  It would be very nice if someone could track down
the underlying problem.

Thanks for writing,
Jonathan