Base X11 libraries cleanup

Adam Jackson ajackson at redhat.com
Thu Jun 29 17:54:22 UTC 2006


Ideally, all libraries should report zero unused direct dependencies 
when inspected with ldd -r -u.  Although in some sense unused libraries 
are harmless, they do put needless pressure on the kernel's VM since all 
processes linked with the affected libraries have to map many more 
files, and in principle you can get unexpected behaviour when symbols 
don't resolve the way you expect due to namespace collisions.

Several of the core X libraries fail this, for not particularly good 
reasons.  I've fixed most of them by now, but there's one or two 
stragglers still.

The side effect of this is that the culled libraries will not be 
included in the linker search scope for any libraries or applications 
above them in the stack.  For example, libXaw no longer links against 
libSM, so if your application linked against libXaw and not libSM, but 
used symbols from libSM, it may now fail at runtime claiming that some 
symbols could not be resolved.  If this happens, the affected package 
needs to be fixed to link against all appropriate libraries directly.

I doubt anyone will actually run into that, but I wanted to give a heads 
up in case it does happen.

(Ideally we should be able to do this for the entire OS.  Baby steps.)

- ajax




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