Title: --as-needed enabled in default profiles
Author: Tomáš Chvátal <scarabeus@gentoo.org>
Content-type: text/plain
Posted: 2010-07-26
Revision: 1
News-Item-Format: 1.0

Starting today all applications emerged on your system are linked
together with additional LDFLAGS="-Wl,--as-needed". This option
allows us to avoid linking extra libraries into the final binary
improving startup times and more importantly making binaries more
resistant to a library SONAME changes [1].

To gain the benefits of the change you should doublecheck your
value of LDFLAGS in make.conf because the variable does not fold and
your make.conf value is final. So after checking it and potentially
removing we suggest rebuilding whole system to benefit from it.

Overriding the in-profiles value is quite simple as described by
previous paragraph. Just put simply LDFLAGS="-Wl,01" in make.conf.

[1] http://www.gentoo.org/proj/en/qa/asneeded.xml