Re: CVS commit: pkgsrc/graphics/xzgv

[Joerg Sonnenberger <joerg%britannica.bec.de@localhost>]

On Sat, Dec 31, 2011 at 02:07:15PM +0100, John Marino wrote:
> On 12/31/2011 1:51 PM, Joerg Sonnenberger wrote:
> >> What's the real impact?  slightly slower startup time?  Is it even
> >> perceptible?
> > 
> > The important part is that it is a *useless* change. There is absolute
> > nothing wrong with indirect symbols.
> 
> The magnitude of the impact of the change is relevant.  Obviously these
> last two sentences are a matter of opinion, and yours differs from the
> authors of binutils.  If the practical impact of eliminating indirect
> symbols is zero, but lets packages remain buildable on new binutils
> linkers, then why crusade against it?

I have no idea how the binutils maintainers justify changing the
semantics of ELF. Given that Linux has in the past silently changed the
platform ABI on i386, I am not surprised by such moves. So far, I have
seen zero *advantage* of eliminating indirect symbol usage. I don't
count working around broken GNU tools as justification. It can
negatively impact performance *for everyone else*. I'd even argue that
it is conter productive to the useful DT_NEEDED eliminated of unused
libraries. *That* in combination with using indirect symbols as
implemented by the dynamic linker anyway, can significantly cut down the
size of the symbol graph.

> >> Otherwise you're basically advocating that all platforms of pkgsrc
> >> either stick to binutils 2.21 or less forever, or that they patch
> >> gold/ld version 2.22+ to behave as before.  I don't think such an
> >> artificial restriction is desirable.
> > 
> > Somehow I don't see that as a strict requirement. Heck, I would consider
> > it worth filling a bug report in binutils...
> 
> Considering big Linux distributions are adapting to this new behavior, I
> doubt any such PR would result in something other than "wontfix".

So we already found out that the sane behavior can be restored by just
adding the right ld option in the wrappers. Meaning, we can essentially
ignore Linux distros breaking the world again. I don't mind adding this
as yet another item of stupid Linuxism. I think the follow email nicely
sums up the position from that camp:

http://www.cygwin.com/ml/libc-alpha/2008-12/msg00068.html

Joerg