State of "indirect deplibs"

[Stepan Kasal]

Hello all, hello Ralf!  ;-)

I was asked about this:
"When I build a binary against a libtyool library, it contains
DT_NEEDED records of indirectly required libraries.  How can I avoid
this?"

My first answer was to refrain from installing *.la files, but the
problem is that the libtool library is in the same tarball as the
binary, so the binary is linked against uninstalled library.

The platform is GNU/Linux, namely current Fedora.

I searched the libtool list archives and found two threads from
Dec 2004:
http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.comp.gnu.libtool.general/4444
http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.comp.gnu.libtool.general/4566

What's the fate of this proposal?  Was it abandoned?  Or is is
genereally accepted, just not yet implemented?

A solution might be to force libtool to use --as-needed.
I always thought it is ugly: first libtool collects the complete
list, then linker throws all of them away...
But in the discussion above, Alex Oliva seems to state that
--as-needed is the way to go.  What's The Right Way(tm) here?

Looking forward for an enlightment,
        Stepan Kasal