[Mageia-dev] [RFC] Removing .la files

[Christiaan Welvaart]

On Fri, 10 Jun 2011, Olav Vitters wrote:

> On Fri, Jun 10, 2011 at 12:41:46PM +0200, Michael Scherer wrote:
>> Le vendredi 10 juin 2011 à 03:47 +0300, Ahmad Samir a écrit :
>>> On 9 June 2011 19:35, Dexter Morgan <dmorganec at gmail.com> wrote:
>>>> Hello,
>>>>
>>>> as other distributions we started to remove .la files from mageia
>>>> during mageia 1 development.
>>
>> Could you explain the rational of removing them ?
>>
>> AFAIK, the .la removal was not discussed, so starting by saying "we
>> remove them now because last time, we didn't discussed and it broke lots
>> of thing" is a little bit weird.
>
> https://live.gnome.org/GnomeShell/RemovingLaFiles

"... but the dirty hacks that jhbuild plays ..."

Problems with dirty hacks are NOT a valid reason to remove libtool 
convenience libraries aka .la files.

> Seems some distributions misunderstand the need and changed the wiki
> page. Removing .la files is needed however, otherwise you'll quickly mix
> distribution installed libraries and self-compiled libraries.

What are you talking about here?

> Difficulty is that this only works when you remove *all* .la files. If
> only one is left compilation is broken.

It is more likely that your build system is broken. If you do not want to 
link against system libraries, remove /lib and /usr/lib from the library 
search dirs list.


     Christiaan