Okay, I’m continuing the work on this, and seems to be quite interesting. The first thing I want to make clear is that using –as-needed requires quite a few rebuild of dependencies when a package fails, as for example packages using lame will fail if you don’t first rebuild lame with a patch I’ve added a bit ago. I won’t do any revbump when I add patches (where I can) so you have to figure out them by yourself.
Another thing is the filtering… I’m adding it to packages I can manage (video and sound) when the solution is non-trivial (such as vlc and mt-daapd), I don’t think anyone else will do that for now, so don’t ask that to be done to the maintainers. Rather, if you give me lists of packages not working (not gnome related) I can see if I have time to do something.
Anyway, many packages that were failing now are fixed, some others needed fixes to deps (such as transcode required lame to be fixed before), and gimp-print required fixes to the package itself (I submitted a bug with the patch if you’re interested in trying out –as-needed). The speedup improvement seems interesting.
One of the things that is probably an hard requirement for using –as-needed is not to have anything using gtk 1.2, as that is absolutely not guaranteed to work.