Re: [gentoo-dev] Re: [Survey || RFC] autotools-utils.eclass

[Nathan Phillip Brink]

On Mon, May 31, 2010 at 03:29:01PM +0200, Maciej Mrozowski wrote:
> On Wednesday 26 of May 2010 19:27:43 Mike Frysinger wrote:
> > On Wednesday 26 May 2010 05:38:00 Maciej Mrozowski wrote:
> > > I've updated documentation, added example usage and option to keep
> > > libtool files (ltdl.so supposedly needs those as I was told, no idea
> > > what for).

IMO, ltdl.so is probably just being silly. Perhaps these files contain
information that is useful on non-Linux systems for dlopen()ing
plugins.

> > more applicable to us w/Linux is that static linking with libtool needs
> > them. the AUTOTOOLS_KEEP_LA_FILES seems kind of spurious considering
> > current tree behavior and assumption of gnu-capable linking systems.
>
> It is spurious when we forget about run-time dynamic linking (plugins) in some
> apps.
> libtool loader (ltdl.so) needs .la files unfortunately. One example -
> imagemagick - removing .la files for coders makes 'convert' unable to locate
> them (silly, but hey...).

This case can be caught by checking if the .la file has the following in it:
``
# Should we warn about portability when linking against -modules?
shouldnotlink=yes
''

If shouldnotlink=no _and_ the .la file in question is not libltdl.la
itself, it is generally safe to remove. This is the current policy of
the portage-multilib branch of the multilib overlay. libtool archive
files which are safe to remove are removed by portage-multilib after
the install phase. It seems to work well enough.

Removing .la files which are useless on a given system would be very
nice. It would be even more useful if unused .a files could be swept
away at the same time :-).

-- 
ohnobinki

Look out for missing apostrophes!