It appears that strip --strip-unneeded sometimes strips too much.
For example, if you take libHStf-random-0.5-926BwEbiHzi7pBkp4dTxOe.a
from the hs-tf-random package on i386 and run strip --strip-unneeded
on it, the T Threefish_256_Process_Block symbol (from threefish_block.o)
is stripped, which shouldn't happen. Note: this specific case applies
to i386, not to amd64. But...
doug@ reported a similar problem for the haskell library texmath,
which we don't yet have in the ports tree, and he made some even
more weird observation: texmath contains the two C source files
cbits/{key,val}ToASCII.c, defining the symbols keylookup (in
keyToAscii.c) and toASCIILut (in valToASCII.c), where both are just
some lookup tables. With strip --strip-unneeded enabled, the resulting
libHStexmath-*.a archive is missing keylookup. doug@ then concatenated
both .c files to a new one and changed the .cabal file of texmath
to use that single one instead, and suddenly the symbol keylookup
no longer was removed.
I'll try to make a port for texmath (which would be required anyway
for porting pandoc) so people who want help to debug this don't
have to build all the haskell goo themselves.