[Kde-pim] Using gold linker as default

[Tobias Koenig]

Hej,

I'd like to propose that all KDE PIM developers use the gold linker instead of
the GNU linker for development.

Pros:
   The gold linker is much faster than the GNU linker, which especially in distributed
   compiliation environments improves the overall compile time in the final linking stage
   on the local machine (hint: try to link QtWebKit with debug symbols with gold and GNU ld to
   see the difference in performance and memory consumption)

   The gold linker is more restrictive when it comes to linking. You have to give the libraries
   you have to link to explicitly. This is a great help for the MacOSX (and Windows?) developers, since
   that's the default behaviour for the linkers on these systems, so they don't have to fix
   our CMakeLists.txt over and over again. IIRC also packagers like the explicit way of defining
   the libraries (can't remember why though).

Cons:
   The gold linker only supports the ELF format, so if you develop on a non-Linux system using it
   might be no option (then use GNU ld as usual)

   The gold linker has problems with compiling kernel code or modules, so you should switch linkers
   before compiling a kernel (however I doubt many KDE PIM developers compiler their own kernel).

You can setup gold quite easily, under Debian there is the package binutils-gold available which
just has to be installed. Other distributions offer such a package as well (no idea about the name though).

Comments?

Ciao,
Tobias
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