While fixing linking problems of libg3d on windows I checked the binutils ld man page again after years and noticed that there are some useful parameters to check for linking misbehaviour on linux. In some rare situations it is a design decision of upstream and not really a "bug" but in most cases someone forgot to link against a library and his current system configuration hides the problem from him. So it isn't a good idea to insist on a bug in upstream or "fixing" it without listening to upstream - unless you liked the infamous openssl random number genererator bug in debian related distributions.