ville.skytta(a)iki.fi (Ville Skyttä) writes:
Inspired by
http://www.redhat.com/archives/fedora-maintainers/2006-June/msg00176.html,
I've had a patch for rpmlint in my local tree for a while which checks for
unused direct shared library dependencies in shared libs.
I'm wondering whether this check is a good idea;
Generally yes; dynamically loaded modules are an exception, because
their deps can be resolved by the loading lib/application already.
Another exception might be glib2 based applications/modules. There seems
to be something wrong with its type system so that applications (which
are not linked against glib2) misbehave when a dynamic module is linked
against glib2. After unloading the module and loading it again, some
types might not be registered right.
But these are minor issues only.
A more major one might be, how this kind of warning can be fixed. All major
buildsystems (libtool, cmake) are creating such unused dependencies. Setting
'-Wl,--as-needed' linkerflags might help with cmake, but fails horribly with
libtool because it moves such linkerflags to the end of the cmdline.
I used some magic like
| sed -i -e 's! -shared ! -Wl,--as-needed\0!g' libtool
after %configure. But it's not a panacea because it will not work for
the exceptions above.
Enrico