Il giorno dom, 31/10/2010 alle 03.30 -0100, Jorge Manuel B. S. Vicetto ha scritto: > As agreed in the meeting, as a first draft, we have that "the motion > is > to drop la files, when appropriate, through the use of a function in > eutils that will only be called if the static-libs use flag is not set > or unless the package relies on pkg-config".
Let's differentiate already: For *plugin* .la files, they should removed if the software is not relying on them to load its plugins, see [1]. This is the case for PAM, Python, Ruby and I guess Perl, which commonly receive stupid .la files in their paths. Repeat after me: they should just all be deleted _right now_ since they are not going to be linked by anyone else and thus Portage 2.1.9 is not making any difference. For *libraries* .la files, they should removed if: - you are not building any static archive at all (and this should happen almost every time the library provides a plugin interface as the plugins wouldn't work with a statically-linked archive); - the official way to link to the library is pkg-config or some other -config package; - the package started as, or is evolving into, a non-autotools-based package (most of X11 falls into this line since they started with imake and that one never produced .la files so nobody should be relying on them); - the library depends on no other library at all (so there are no dependencies to cater); - finally, if USE=static-libs is set Do note that static-libs USE flag causing the removal is the _least_ common case, quite very likely, you're going to stop at the second line in my list and then delete the files. It's similar to what I wrote on [2], by the way. [1] http://blog.flameeyes.eu/2009/07/06/identifying-pointless-la-files-for-plugins [2] http://blog.flameeyes.eu/2009/09/28/removing-la-files-for-dum-w-uncertain-people -- Diego Elio Pettenò — “Flameeyes” http://blog.flameeyes.eu/ If you found a .asc file in this mail and know not what it is, it's a GnuPG digital signature: http://www.gnupg.org/
