On 05-10-2010 12:03, Diego Elio Pettenò wrote: > Il giorno mar, 05/10/2010 alle 09.52 +0200, Angelo Arrifano ha scritto: >> >> Like Richard said "Gentoo is about choice... >> >> By removing .la files, you are taking away that choice from the user. >> For you they might be useless, for some user (or entire software >> house) >> it can be its holly grail for library versioning and linking. I don't >> really feel like forcing users to change their build setups just >> because >> we think they are useless, do you? >> - It is decisions like this one that *might* give us bad reputation. >> >> Should we also start removing package-config files just because there >> are better ways to detect if a certain package is installed? > > Again, I ask you: how do libtool archive work? What is lost by removing > them? How can any software out there rely on them?
You can extract from a .la things like the library name, version and linking information (lib dependencies and paths). The information is there and nothing prevented anyone from using it. > > Can you provide any specific use case, or are you now arguing for > "choice for choice's sake"? There are a lot of packages that need this information to correctly link against libtool managed libraries, for example, there are packages that linked against GL but didn't set -lGL -lGLU because it was relying on libtool to get that information (guess from where?). Things get worse when they also expect libtool to also provide libraries path. There are even packages that expects libtool to provide linker flags for its direct dependencies and flags for the dependencies of its dependencies. For example: foo links with GL (expects libtool to provide -lGL -lGLU) foo also links with the backend of GL (expects libtool to provide -lX11 for example, which is a dependency of GL) In a perfect world everyone would be using pkg-config or whatever, but not. I happen to be bitching about this because I came across some of these when cross-compiling. > > Should we remove /usr/bin/xml2-config? No. Why? Because there are > packages out there not using pkg-config to detect libxml2, upstream > libxml2 provides that explicitly and allows it to be used as such: > > $(CC) $(CFLAGS) $(LDFLAGS) `xml2-config --cflags` foo.c -o foo > `xml2-config --libs` > > Should we remove /usr/lib/libxml2.la? Yes. Why? Because upstream does > not explicitly provide it (it's a byproduct of libtool), and they don't > require/ask to rely on it (otherwise it wouldn't provide pkg-config > or .pc files). > > Again, I'm not arguing over semantics or feelings here, I'm arguing with > facts; can you argue with facts or are you just going to quote Richard > again and propose "choice for choice's sake"? > Mind you that the community is wider than one can imagine. I happen to work in the academia and I know a lot of nasty stuff people do to save time (at least is what they think) for deadlines. As a user, I would hate to have my research program/script broken just because some dev decided to make the distribution I use his personal sandbox. Besides, doesn't this kind of changes belong in upstream and then eventually come to the distros? Why don't you make a patch and send upstream if these libtool files are so useless?
