Hi Peter, On Tue, Dec 05, 2006 at 03:27:04PM -0600, Peter Samuelson wrote: > [Joe Orton] > > `neon-config --la-file` is part of the defined and documented neon > > interface: removing the .la file breaks that interface, and hence > > will break applications designed to build against neon. > > So, I was the one who requested that the neon26 maintainer remove the > .la file. I'll incorporate Ondrej and Steve's comments by reference > here - suffice it to say Debian has good reasons to want to phase out > .la files entirely, if possible.
Debian has good reasons to want to avoid propagating unnecessary shared library dependencies. You can achieve that goal using a trival sed command for neon: sed -i "s/^\(dependency_libs\).*/\1='-lneon'/" libneon.la which avoids breaking the neon interface. This is correct for current versions of neon iff you don't care about supporting static linking via the .la file. For libraries where the API of dependencies may leak through to the application, naively removing the .la file hides *necessary* shared library dependencies, which is simply unsafe. That's why the only safe way to fix this problem in general is at libtool level, as I mentioned before. (there are several cases in libraries I deal with: Subversion leaks the APR API, APR-util leaks the OpenLDAP API, OpenLDAP and PostgreSQL both leak the OpenSSL API) > As for 'neon-config --la-file', I am curious why it even exists. Is > not 'neon-config --libs' just as effective? Using the .la file is unambigious in cases where you have more than one libneon.so in the library path; libtool will link against the correct .so using an absolute path if given the absolute path to the .la, which cannot be achieved in the general case using --libs. Regards, joe -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact [EMAIL PROTECTED]
