Peter Alfredsen wrote:

> I've given this some thought and I think I've been convinced that
> dberkholz' position is probably the most tenable. If this is to be
> done, we should do it in a documented "Gentooish" way. The problem with
> going down the FEATURES road are two-fold:
> 1) What should the behavior of the FEATURES flag be?
> 
> I think it should act like an INSTALL_MASK="*.la" and
> EXTRA_ECONF="--disable-static"
> 
> There should also be a function, let's call it "exemptthis.la" that
> would exempt a .la file from being punted, so the RESTRICT could be
> made on a per-la file basis.
>
If it's a FEATURE defaulting to off, which makes sense from the opt-in
perspective, surely a simple Property would do the job for most cases?
 
> 2) Who implements in portage?
> 
> [...I know nothing of portage internals...]
>
Properties are bedded in, all you need is a bit of BASH, to be run for those
packages you maintain; and to add the functionality you mentioned above,
etc.
 
> 3) Grunt work?
> 
> This should be rather easy. Just assign the bugs to me and I shall add
> RESTRICTs as-needed.
>
Might be wise to prove it on a smaller subset first, for those packages
where you know it's not going to cause an issue, and if it did it wouldn't
cause a machine to be unbootable. (Personally I'd understand a user being
peeved if they couldn't get their desktop up, but it's not that big a deal
provided there's an easy command to run to fix it, and there's notice
given; this is Gentoo, after all.)
 
> Anyway, we really need to start punting .la files one way or the other.
> For desktop users of our distro, they do a lot more harm than good. For
> embedded, perhaps static linking serves some purpose, but really, if
> you can't afford dynamic linking, what are you going to run on your
> board?
> 
Libtool is sweet from a software developer's pov, especially in its heyday.
OFC it might cause distros a bit of aggro, but hey you get to decide what
to patch and how. I'm in favour so long as it is only ever an opt-in, or
not enabled in anything but developer or desktop/Linux profiles (the latter
after at least a year or two of testing and bug resolution.)