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

Fri Jun 10 12:41:46 CEST 2011

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.
+
+
+> > Unfortunatly we didn't had enough time to finish this.
+> >
+> > I restarted this task today.
+> >
+> >
+> > Please tell me if a build fails because of a missing la file.
+> >
+> 
+> >From building pidgin-libnotify locally:
+> libtool: link: cannot find the library `/usr/lib64/libatk-1.0.la' or
+> unhandled argument `/usr/lib64/libatk-1.0.la'
+> 
+> >From the chroot:
+> $ cd usr/lib64/
+> $ grep libatk-1.0.la *
+> libindicate-gtk.la:dependency_libs=' /usr/lib64/libindicate.la
+> /usr/lib64/libgtk-x11-2.0.la /usr/lib64/libgdk-x11-2.0.la
+> /usr/lib64/libatk-1.0.la /usr/lib64/libpangocairo-1.0.la
+> /usr/lib64/libpangoft2-1.0.la /usr/lib64/libgdk_pixbuf-2.0.la
+> /usr/lib64/libcairo.la /usr/lib64/libpixman-1.la
+> /usr/lib64/libXrender.la /usr/lib64/libX11.la /usr/lib64/libxcb.la
+> /usr/lib64/libXau.la /usr/lib64/libXdmcp.la -lpng12
+> /usr/lib64/libpango-1.0.la /usr/lib64/libfontconfig.la
+> /usr/lib64/libfreetype.la /usr/lib64/libxml2.la -lm
+> /usr/lib64/libdbusmenu-glib.la /usr/lib64/libgio-2.0.la -lresolv -lz
+> /usr/lib64/libgmodule-2.0.la -ldl -ldbus-glib-1 -ldbus-1
+> /usr/lib64/libgobject-2.0.la /usr/lib64/libgthread-2.0.la -lpthread
+> /usr/lib64/libglib-2.0.la /usr/lib64/libpcre.la -lrt'
+> 
+> 
+> I don't think just building packages and removing the .la will work,
+> the inter-dependency is too wide, I count too many .la files up there.
+> 
+> Reading these:
+> http://wiki.debian.org/ReleaseGoals/LAFileRemoval
+> http://lists.debian.org/debian-devel/2009/08/msg00783.html
+> 
+> it looks like Debian are using sed to remove the .la files from
+> dependency_libs field in .la files, there's a debhelper script, IIUC
+> it's run before they build a package.
+> 
+> This means it's something that a script run as root in the chroot can
+> do, but I guess it needs to be fine-tuned.
+> 
+> Meanwhile, just removing .la files will break a lot of builds (note
+> that we have a lot of packages to rebuild for e.g. new libnotify major
+> in Cauldron)... :(
+
+Ie, we need to remove them in the proper order. 
+One first step would be to find the dependency tree ( should be
+basically the same as BuildRequires ) and start bu shaving the leafs.
+
+-- 
+Michael Scherer
+
+