[gentoo-dev] Re: .la files removal news item (GLEP 42)

[Diego Elio Pettenò]

Il giorno ven, 01/10/2010 alle 18.42 +0300, Eray Aslan ha scritto:
>
> Why not push for stabilization of 2.1.9 and then do the news item?  Am
> I
> missing something?

Yah, the bickering of some people at having .la files disappear under
their feet, probably because they are affectionate to them, or force
them to consider dong a bit more cleanup work.

But since the suggestions are already useful, I guess it would be a
decent time to tell users about them; I have suggested doing so for a
very long time already; it worked for all the people whom I know have
been using it, it worked for me; heck it even avoided the tinderbox to
stop when automagic dependencies over selinux where passing down.

But it's trying to solve a problem that is at least three years old;
it's a suggestion I made more over an year ago; and that people shot
down many many times.

Sincerely, the naysayers on the .la matter have already broken enough
systems by not allowing .la files to die earlier, and now they are
pretending that there is no problem in waiting another X years in
"planning" a conversion that for what they are concerned is never going
to happen.

So basically, this is my token: we can tell users to do it this way and
they won't feel pain at all; or we can't tell them, and when maintainers
get pissed off by .la files enough they delete them, leaving users to
Google their solution.

I, sincerely, have poured enough effort in trying to solve the issue,
discussing it, documenting it, showing how to deal with new packages,
showing how to identify pointless .la files that only increase the
number of them installed and cause false positives… and I'm still told
that a) I haven't done _enough_, as I had to prepare a master plan of it
and b) I'm too negative about stuff.

-- 
Diego Elio Pettenò — “Flameeyes”
http://blog.flameeyes.eu/

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