On Friday 14 November 2008 14:25:30 Alexis Ballier wrote: > Moreover .la files are good when you want to link statically to some > library because they carry the needed information; they should be > punted only when said library provides a good alternative (like a .pc > file with correct libs.private field).
Even if the .pc file exists and is fully correct, removing the .la file still breaks any application that links statically and relies on libtool to deal with library dependencies, rather than using pkg-config (and there's no reason why an application /shouldn't/ do that - after all, it works perfectly with the library as upstream released it). Maybe we think it's worth the effort to tweak the application's build system (there probably won't be all that many applications that need it, after all), but this /is/ an incompatible change to the library, and if we're going to do it, we should at least be aware of what we're doing.
