Fedora 30 To Take Stab At Eliminating Excessive Linking

As what was a proposal to eliminate unnecessary linking in Fedora 29 is going to be postponed to be an early change for Fedora 30.

This change is about passing "--as-needed" as a linker flag when building packages. That flag tells the linker to only link libraries containing symbols used by the executable/library being linked rather than everything.

By only linking the symbols actually used, this can be a big savings when building projects like large frameworks and can yield lower start-up times due to loading less libraries and smaller metadata.

As this change was proposed late in the F29 cycle and after the mass rebuild already happened, the Fedora Engineering and Steering Committee decided at today's meeting to move the change to the F30 cycle.

They are planning for this linker flag change to happen soon after Fedora 29 is branched from Rawhide, to allow for maximum time to test/evaluate the impact during the Fedora 30 cycle. The branching of F29 from Rawhide is expected to happen around 14 August. The Fedora 29 release is expected to happen by the end of October while Fedora 30 is anticipated for debut in early May.