Re: [gentoo-dev] Re: Removing .la files

[Nathan Phillip Brink]

On Sun, Oct 24, 2010 at 09:57:33PM +0000, Duncan wrote:
> Enrico Weigelt posted on Sun, 24 Oct 2010 22:09:30 +0200 as excerpted:
>
> > I'm doing some investigation on which .la files are still needed and
> > which are not. In general, .la files only are in use by very few
> > packages which use them to load plugins (I've seen no package which
> > actually requires them for compile-time importing in production).
>
> FWIW, flameeyes has done quite a bit of work on this, but I'm not sure
> it's published anywhere.
>
> FWIW2, I recently took the big jump myself, PKG_INSTALL_MASKing *.la files
> (I run FEATURES=buildpkg so that's effectively install-masking them too,
> but they don't get in the binpkgs at all that way), then rebuilding my
> entire system, and while it's /possible/ certain plugins don't work, I've
> not noticed it.

I use tommy's portage-multilib which doesn't install any .la files
unless if ``shouldnotlink=true'' is found in the .la file. I think
that the only sorts of problems we've encountered are similar to bug
300256 (caused by Gentoo splitting up a package into multiple
ebuilds).

> I needed only one exception, sys-devel/libtool itself.  At least one
> package (IIRC imagemagick but I could be recalling incorrectly) tests for
> a properly configured libtool in the configure script by testing for
> libtool's single *.la file, libltdl.la, so I had to rebuild/reinstall
> libtool itself without that mask.

This problem is found in an autoconf macro shipped with libtool itself:

http://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/bug-libtool/2009-12/msg00023.html
http://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/bug-libtool/2010-02/msg00046.html

Likewise, portage-multilib is configured by default to install .la
files for the libtool package to work around this bug.

-- 
binki

Look out for missing apostrophes!