Shared library size anomaly

[Bryce McKinlay]

Here's something weird that I noticed while messing around with the 
merge patch. A libgcj.so created by:

$ ld -r -o temp.o (all object files...)
$ gcj --shared temp.o -o libgcj.so

is some 400K smaller than one created with:

$ gcj --shared -o libgcj.so (all object files...)

Each of the libraries works fine. Examining with objdump revealed that 
almost all the sections had slightly different sizes, however .rodata 
seems to be accounting for most of the discrepancy:

- 11 .rodata       000a0599  005c6440  005c6440  005c6440  2**5
+ 11 .rodata       000f776b  005ca1e0  005ca1e0  005ca1e0  2**5
                    CONTENTS, ALLOC, LOAD, READONLY, DATA

Any clues what would cause this? Could this be a constant merging bug? 
This test was done with the merge patch applied, I havn't tried it 
without the patch yet.

Regards

Bryce.