Re: link dependencies

[Simon Josefsson]

> The 'Link' section in the module description is only informative.
> 
> Originally, we thought that it would be good to note, in the 'Link'
> section,
> only the immediate link dependencies of the module, and let the user
> use
>   ./gnulib-tool --extract-recursive-link-directive MODULE
> for the rest.
> 
> But in the past few years, it has turned out that this does not work
> well:
> As a user of a module, we don't look at the recursive dependencies
> closure
> any more (partly because this closure is so large, often). The user
> of a
> module looks at the module description _only_.
> 
> And so, the 'Link' section needs to contain the recursive link
> directive.
> And when changing some module to use 'getrandom', all direct and
> indirect
> callers of this module must get $(LIB_GETRANDOM) added to their
> module
> descriptions.
> 
> Note that we don't (yet) follow this rule strictly for $(LIBINTL) and
> $(LIBUNISTRING). But for more rarely used libraries like
> $(LIB_GETRANDOM)
> it's worth it.

Thanks for explaining!  It seems sub-optimal, but I can't think of what
a better solution would be.

/Simon