On Wed, Jul 27, 2005 at 08:57:51PM -0400, Stephen Frost wrote: > * Steve Langasek (vorlon@debian.org) wrote: > > On Wed, Jul 27, 2005 at 07:20:44PM -0400, Stephen Frost wrote: > > > libtool is broken in this regard and needs to be fixed to survive > > > missing files. > > Then fix it instead of giving people bad advice. > Do you actually have anything beyond "libtool breaks otherwise, so it > *must* be good!"? Here's some advice: rm *.la. Yay, fixes the problem > *and* doesn't require everyone to add in dependencies that end up > pulling in hundreds of unneeded packages when trying to build something. Dropping .la files, without also dropping .a files, will unnecessarily complicate matters for anyone statically linking against that lib. As long as we still nominally support static linking, I expect that most lib maintainers are not going to be willing to do this. But ok, yes, that is an option; let's spell the options out completely: - Don't ship .la files in the -dev package; don't depend on any other -dev packages except those whose headers you need. This gives optimal results for shared linking by pruning all unnecessary build-dependencies and dependencies; but it also screws over anyone trying to do static linking, who now has to go *recursively* hunt down the package name for each of the library dependencies, based only on the names of the symbols exported. (So why would anyone ship the static libs at this point...?) - Kill the .la files and .a files. Drop support for static linking. Not something that should be done lightly and without prior project-wide discussion. - Leave the .la files in place; -dev packages need to depend on -dev packages corresponding to those runtime dependencies that are also built using libtool. This is the status quo. > Yes, let's fix libtool. No, I don't think we should screw over anyone > trying to do development because it's broken. ... -- Steve Langasek postmodern programmer
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