[gentoo-dev] Re: Removing .la files

[Duncan]

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 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.

I handled it using /etc/portage/env/sys-devel/libtool, which contains only 
the single setting:

PKG_INSTALL_MASK=

thus undoing the make.conf setting of:

# dump *.la files
PKG_INSTALL_MASK="*.la"

So as of now:

$ equery b -f '.*\.la$'
 * Searching for .*\.la$ ... 
sys-devel/libtool-2.2.10 (/usr/lib64/libltdl.la)
$ 

That's it! =:^)

Of course, the rebuild process likely wouldn't have gone so smoothly if I 
hadn't already had lafilefixer hooked even before FEATURES=fixlafiles (and 
was running --as-needed in LDFLAGS before that), with the system only 
recently entirely rebuilt when I upgraded to gcc-4.5, so there weren't any 
nasties in the existing *.la files to snag the rebuild. =:^)

-- 
Duncan - List replies preferred.   No HTML msgs.
"Every nonfree program has a lord, a master --
and if you use the program, he is your master."  Richard Stallman