Mike Auty <ikelos@g.o> posted 4841A7DA.7060605@g.o,
excerpted below, on  Sat, 31 May 2008 20:32:42 +0100:

> I think you're looking for the wrong things.  I'm not an expert, but I
> think --as-needed means that if there are 20 libraries on your system
> that use libexpat.so.0 and 400 programs that use those 20 libraries,
> when libexpat is updated to libexpat.so.1, you only need to rebuild the
> 20 libraries, not all 420 packages (as you would do otherwise).  I
> believe that's the main reason for using as-needed...

That has certainly been my experience.  I've had way less rebuilds to 
worry about since I added that to my LDFLAGS and rebuilt the system.  
revdep-rebuild -p, which I run regularly after major world upgrades, 
returns far fewer packages to rebuild, now.

-- 
Duncan - List replies preferred.   No HTML msgs.
"Every nonfree program has a lord, a master --
and if you use the program, he is your master."  Richard Stallman

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