disable as-needed by default?

[Volker Lendecke]

On Tue, Jul 20, 2010 at 08:04:58PM +0200, Björn JACKE wrote:
> today I added a configure test to master which catches the case of buggy ld
> version which make the use of the as-needed linker flag error-prone on some
> systems. Volker and maybe others have objections to keep using the flag even
> with the configure test in place. Attached is the patch to disable it by
> default. Are there objections to change the default to not use it?

My fear is the following: I have seen a failure on FreeBSD,
so I removed it. You were 100% certain to have fixed it and
thus re-added it. But in fact the FreeBSD linker failed in
a way that was unexpected. How many other unexpected failure
modes are still lurking out there?

The other fear is that even if the test is correct, we might
have configure tests before the as-needed tests that would
fail if run with as-needed but don't see that failure
because as-needed is only activated later. If this happened,
we would not see the failure before the final build. This
introduces a dependency on the order of configure tests that
every developer needs to be aware of.

Volker