Re: [gentoo-dev] Developers, please work on underlinking issues!

[Daniel Campbell <zlg@gentoo.org>]

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On 08/17/2016 01:37 PM, Michał Górny wrote:
> Hello, fellow developers.
> 
> TL;DR: switch to the darn gold linker, and start fixing your darn
> packages!
> 
> After many years, the underlinking tracker [1] is still full of bugs.
> This is a huge QA problem, and most of the developers don't test for
> it.
> 
> Long story short, the thing usually looks like this: a developer
> switches to the gold linker, starts hitting build failures
> and reporting bugs. Most of the time, nobody gives a damn about those
> bugs and the developer eventually gives up, wants to be able to upgrade
> his system again and switches back to bfd.
> 
> So I'm asking shortly: please start caring. Switch to gold:
> 
> $ sudo binutils-config --linker ld.gold
> 
> Test your packages. Report bugs upstream. Get them fixed.
> 
> If someone already tested it and reported the bug, proxy it upstream.
> Don't expect everyone else to do the dirty work on your packages.
> 
> This is not some problem with a fancy non-standard configuration.
> ld.gold is just the messenger, and the message is: you are not linking
> to the libraries you are using. This is serious, and your package only
> works by accident. Of course, you don't have to pass my exact words
> upstream.
> 
> That said, I'd really like for Gentoo to be able to finally switch to
> ld.gold by default. However, that can't happen if every common system is
> going to have 1-3 packages failing to build.
> 
> Thanks in advance.
> 
> [1]:https://bugs.gentoo.org/show_bug.cgi?id=underlinking
> 

Is it as simple as switching the linker and re-merging packages that one
maintains? Is gold supposed to be a big deal? Does it do the job of
linking better? I read the blog post and all but nobody's explaining
what gold does better than standard ld.

That said, if it's that simple and then just requires some DEPEND
updating, doesn't sound all that bad to me.
-- 
Daniel Campbell - Gentoo Developer
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