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

[David Leverton]

On 2 October 2010 20:54, Jorge Manuel B. S. Vicetto
<jmbsvicetto@g.o> wrote:
> Given the recent activity around .la files and conflict about how to
> deal with them, I propose we discuss this issue in this mailing list,
> and take this issue to the council.
> That way, we can make a global decision, taking into account all the
> arguments for and against, find a balance, opt for a policy, inform
> users and developers about it and move on.

While I do agree that the underlying problem we're trying to solve is
worth solving, I do have a couple of small concerns about how it's
being done.  The first is that it seems people are judging whether a
particular .la file is "needed" by checking whether anything currently
in the tree needs it, but this doesn't take into account anything that
/isn't/ in the tree yet.  The second is that removing .la files
everywhere makes it hard for people to experiment with alternative
solutions, as testing an alternative would require modifying all the
affected ebuilds to stop removing them.  (And yes, I am interested in
doing so myself, although time constraints mean it might not
happening.)

Would it be too much trouble to have a standardised variable that
means .la files should be kept?  It maybe /shouldn't/ be exposed as a
USE flag because very few people will need it, but if it's easy to
implement (maybe by having an eutils function to do the removal,
checking the variable first) it would remove any objections I could
imagine.

As I said, these are minor points, and I wouldn't expect people to go
to great effort to satisfy them.  Just something to consider.