why_live ?

[Michael Meeks <michael dot meeks at collabora dot com>]

Hi guys,

	Sorry to be a pain - but I couldn't dig this out of the mail archive /
web page. We've a code size problem (this is LibreOffice ;-) that we're
solving with -ffunction-sections --gc-sections et. al. which works
really nicely great.

	However, there are still a number of things stuck in there that it is
hard to determine why they are needed; of course - it is possible to manually
remove them, and see who the linker complains about wrt. their users :-) and
repeat that process to get some view of why; however Apple's linker has a
-why_live parameter that helps a lot here:

	http://www.unix.com/man-page/osx/1/ld/
  
	I was wondering if gold / ld have some moral equivalent ? The output
shows the chain of references that suck the symbol on; eg.

	http://users.freedesktop.org/~michael/why_live.filt.txt

	Is there an equivalent for binutils ?

	Many thanks,

		Michael.

-- 
 michael.meeks@collabora.com  <><, Pseudo Engineer, itinerant idiot