disable as-needed by default?

[Björn Jacke]

On 2010-07-20 at 20:11 +0200 Volker Lendecke sent off:
> 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.

the good thing about having features enabled by default is that we see when we
break our own stuff. Distros use that flag nowadays most of the time if
possible to minimize packet dependencies. Unfortunaely many packages have
linker options wrongly ordered in their buildsystems, like we did, before we
enabled it before 3.5. If we completely disable it now I bet it will take a
couple of weeks until someome accidently adds linker options in the wrong order
(object files after library flags) so that the feature will be broken again. 

So how about enabling it when --enable-developer is used and else leave it off
by default? That way we will probably ensure we keep the build stuff clean and
people out there who will not use --enable-developer will not run into whatever
effects that might wait there.

Björn
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