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

[Olav Vitters]

On Fri, Jun 10, 2011 at 04:15:01PM +0200, Christiaan Welvaart wrote:
> >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 you skipped the initial bit, where it explains that the .la has
the full path.

> >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?

"The particular problem with these .la files is that they have hardcoded
paths in them. So, for example, if /usr/lib/libgnome-menu.so just
contains the information that it requires libglib-2.0.so.0 but
/usr/lib/libgnome-menu.la says that it wants /usr/lib/libglib-2.0.la, it
causes libtool to link against /usr/lib/libglib-2.0.so at link time.
This is fine for a lot of typical build scenarios, but the dirty hacks
that jhbuild plays to get it to sandbox your system understandably
breaks. "

> >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.

That's not enough, the .la files add libraries in /lib and /usr/lib.

Fedora has for instance already removed the .la files. Other
distributions are working on it (even Debian).
-- 
Regards,
Olav