Re: PATCH: Support LD_SYMBOLIC and LD_SYMBOLIC_FUNCTIONS

["H. J. Lu" <hjl at lucon dot org>]

On Thu, Jan 25, 2007 at 05:08:22PM +0000, Nick Clifton wrote:
> 
> >>  Is it really that much easier to set an environment variable for a 
> >>particular package, as opposed to say, altering its Makefile or build 
> >>script ?
> >
> >Can you try to enable -Bsymbolic-functions for all or selective
> >packages, e.g. GTK+, Pango, Firefox, Open Office, ...  in a distro,
> >like FC6 or FC7?
> 
> No.  But then I do not do things like that and I do not have a build 
> environment set up to run this kind of test.  I was asking you, since I 
> think that you do have this kind of knowledge, if you could tell me why 
> using environment variables in this way would be a good thing.  Are the 
> alternatives really so bad ?  If this feature is only for user 
> convenience, then we should really consider whether it is worth it.  If 
> supporting this environment variable will make our 
> (binutils-maintaining) lives harder then do we really want to do it ?

When you have many complex pages, like Open Office, it isn't
practical to modify sources directly to support -Bsymbloic-functions.
I tried it and gave up. With an environment variable, I just need
to do

# LD_SYMBOLIC_FUNCTIONS=1 rpmbuild --rebuild openoffice.org-2.0.4-5.5.10.src.rpm

to rebuild Open Office with optimized DSOs and I don't have to write
one single line of code.  You can optimize all or some packages.
It is much nicer than a wrapper script, with that, you have to make
sure that the right wrapper script is used to for packages you want to
optimize. With an environment variable, you can add

export LD_SYMBOLIC_FUNCTIONS=1

to openoffice.org.spec and you just need to do

# rpmbuild -ba openoffice.org.spec

You don't have to change sources of Open Office.


H.J.