[gentoo-dev] Re: .la files and their future on Gentoo

[Diego Elio Pettenò]

Il giorno sab, 02/10/2010 alle 19.54 +0000, Jorge Manuel B. S. Vicetto
ha scritto:
>
> With that goal in mind, I'd like to ask anyone with arguments about
> this
> issue to present them as a reply to this thread.

I'm going instead to link my latest blog post on the matter where I
summarised most of the points. Why a blog post? Because so I have it
available as reference for the future together with all the others.
Don't like that? Sorry, I don't care; I'm presenting information, if you
choose to not even look at it because I serve it via HTTP rather than a
mailing list, do state so; I'll make sure to ignore any of your opinions
in the future.

Now, stop with the less-than-friendly remarks, the content is at

http://blog.flameeyes.eu/2010/10/04/libtool-archives-and-their-pointless-points

Also, I would like to ask again that if you're going to argue "you never
know who might use them", you're going to have to actually understand
_what_ the files are used for, _which_ software uses them, and come up
with a use case for them, not a vague "oh there might be a project that
use them".

I might disagree with Nirbheek's assessment with the severity of the hit
on users (or rather, on the relative severity of it compared with the
alternative), but his reasoning is at least sound and based on real
concerns. Things like "taking in account what isn't in the
tree" (without actually having a clue on what .la files are for),
looking for "alternative approaches" (to do what, exactly?), or "fixing
what needs .la files" (why? if the package needs its own .la files to be
around and nothing else, just leave it be!) are not concerns that I care
about because they are not based on actual usefulness of .la files but
on vague ideas of either fending off the finding of a solution (I don't
want to know why, sincerely) or the idea that .la files are a binary
situation where you shouldn't have any at all.

From my point of view, the only points worth to be raised are Nirbheek's
(even though I disagree, as I said), Rémi's (which I don't think he
either considers showstoppers at this point) and those not-yet-spoken
off by Prefix (they might support architectures where .la files are
worth something).

Other than that, do we really have a problem here? Nirbheek's point
about stable will become moot next month; since we shouldn't revert the
changes that did go to stable, we're left with two main issues here:

 - is it okay to drop them from stable? my personal opinion here is to
side with Samuli and say "yes"; on the other hand, since by the looks of
it, and the status report Zac gave us, we're going to need just one
extra month before just telling users "install lafilefixer and update to
stable portage 2.1.9.13", I think we can avoid doing any more of those
changes till then — in stable that is; this includes both non-revbumps
and stable requests of packages dropping them;
 - what about Rémi's 2b concern? Sincerely I have worked for a long time
with static linking on my job and I don't see libtool files being so
excessively necessary; the only problem comes with transitive
dependencies, but most packages already take care of that; even if you
do not use pkg-config, you have other means to recover it.

On the other hand, I propose that if somebody have time on their hands
(I sincerely don't, unless somebody's going to hire me to, and I'm dead
serious), lafilefixer could be improved, and quick-stabled together with
the new portage in case, so that it saves the modified metadata in the
VDB.

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

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