On 2 October 2010 20:54, Jorge Manuel B. S. Vicetto <jmbsvice...@gentoo.org> 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.
