<video> tag broken in oneiric only due to --as-needed in the toolchain

build log of 14.0.788.0~svn20110609r88472 on natty with the codecs built in verbose mode

further info:

- oneiric/amd64 is impacted too, so it's not arch specific
- natty with binutils 2.21.52 (same as oneiric) is not impacted, so binutils is not the problem.

also broken with the default gcc 4.6.

I've backported binutils (2.21.52.20110606-1ubuntu1) & gcc-4.5 (4.5.3-1ubuntu2) from oneiric to natty, rebuilt chromium M14 with those, and it's still ok.

So it seems to imply it's neither gcc nor binutils.
I'm out of ideas.

What's left? glibc?

a debug build didn't give a hint either :(

Fixed. It turned out to be a toolchain change.

Short story: oneiric comes with --as-needed by default, so -lvpx was silently dropped from libffmpegsumo.so, resulting in no support for the HTML5 <video> tag in the browser.

Long story: --as-needed was introduced to reduce the number of dependencies of packages. This is a change which happened in other distros (Debian, Fedora, Suse) and should have happened in Natty but was dropped at the last minute. Some packages are not impacted, but a long list are, including chromium. It's properly described here: http://wiki.debian.org/ToolChain/DSOLinking

This bug was fixed in the package chromium-browser - 12.0.742.112~r90304-0ubuntu1

---------------
chromium-browser (12.0.742.112~r90304-0ubuntu1) oneiric; urgency=high

  * New Minor upstream release from the Stable Channel (LP: #803107)
    This release fixes the following security issues:
    + WebKit issues:
      - [84355] High, CVE-2011-2346: Use-after-free in SVG font handling.
        Credit to miaubiz.
      - [85003] High, CVE-2011-2347: Memory corruption in CSS parsing. Credit
        to miaubiz.
      - [85102] High, CVE-2011-2350: Lifetime and re-entrancy issues in the
        HTML parser. Credit to miaubiz.
      - [85211] High, CVE-2011-2351: Use-after-free with SVG use element.
        Credit to miaubiz.
      - [85418] High, CVE-2011-2349: Use-after-free in text selection. Credit
        to miaubiz.
    + Chromium issues:
      - [77493] Medium, CVE-2011-2345: Out-of-bounds read in NPAPI string
        handling. Credit to Philippe Arteau.
      - [85177] High, CVE-2011-2348: Bad bounds check in v8. Credit to Aki
        Helin of OUSPG.
  Packaging changes:
  * Add Valencian (ca@valencia) to the list of supported langs for the
    lang-packs
    - update debian/rules
    - update debian/control
  * Add support for language variants in Grit, backported from trunk.
    This is needed to support lang-codes like ca@valencia
    - add debian/patches/grit_language_variants.patch
    - update debian/patches/series
  * Add a WANT_ONLY_WHITELISTED_NEW_LANGS knob to make it easier to
    sync translations of new langs between all the branches
    - update debian/rules
  * Properly stop the keep-alive when the build fails
    - update debian/rules
  * Fix the HTML5 <video> tag regression in Oneiric by properly linking
    libvpx so it's not being dropped from libffmpegsumo.so (LP: #795171)
    - add debian/patches/html5-codecs-fix.patch
    - update debian/patches/series
  * Drop the -inspector package, its content has been merged into the main deb
    in M12 and the deb remained empty since.
    Also drop chromium-codecs-ffmpeg-nonfree, renamed in M5 to -extra
    - update debian/control
    - update debian/rules
  * Backport of http://codereview.chromium.org/6883221 from M13 presumably
    fixing the ARM ftbfs from the last update, and set use_cups=0 on armel
    - add debian/patches/cups_cleanup_cr6883221.patch
    - update debian/patches/series
    - update debian/rules
 -- Fabien Tassin <email address hidden> Tue, 28 Jun 2011 07:17:52 +0200