Linker options can break symbols tests

[MeisterEule]

The symbols tests rely on the assumption that protofunc.c is linked in such a way that all symbols in there are included in the test binary. The linking is forced by calling protofunc_0_0. However, this function only calls protofunc_[1-6]_0 functions. This means that most of the symbols are not used. With standard settings, they are included in the symbol table anyhow. However, there exists a linker option to exclude unused symbols: --gc-sections. The problem is that this has been observed to appear in the linker options that autotools automatically generates for some setups. It is not yet clear to me how it decides which options to use and which not.

I think that it's not worthwhile to tinker with autotools so that this option never appears. Instead, I see these alternatives:

• Check if --gc-sections is included in LDFLAGS and set mmax accordingly.
• Just leave it as it is and add a comment in the error message notifying the user to check if this option is used.

[MeisterEule]

This issue does not appear when you specify CXX=g++.

[SpinTensor]

Should be solved by commit f757ee41a90c86e99b3baa775a975816f692d12f. There was a bug in the protofunctions that not all of them were part of the calling structure. Now all of them are called, thus always linked, independent of the linker flags. You may test it and close this issue.

[SpinTensor]

Can this be closed?

[MeisterEule]

Yes