Hi Neil, On Sun, Apr 03, 2011 at 11:53:02AM +0100, Neil Williams wrote: > http://lists.debian.org/debian-devel/2009/08/msg00808.html > I'm now getting patches from Ubuntu to catch up the effects of this old > Release Goal. I fully support the removal of .la files [0] but it would > be good if we could refresh the original goal so that .la files can be > removed rather than applying a piece-meal set of patches to only > certain packages which have been spotted independently. That way leads > only to pain. > Let's try and handle the .la file issue across all of Debian. Thanks for raising this topic on debian-devel. The bug reports you've seen are the result of me working through the set of libraries whose .la files were broken when the initial multiarch library set landed in Ubuntu. Given that this release goal is a couple of years old and the recommendation is also in Policy for a while now, the degree of .la file breakage here is not something I had expected; roughly 170 libraries in total had references to .la files for core libraries that were invalidated by the move to multiarch, so we've been burning through these as quickly as possible (and forwarding patches upstream to Debian) to ensure Ubuntu remains buildable from source for the natty release. Now that this is largely out of the way, we should definitely look at a more general and scalable solution than filing patches against each package with a .la file. In addition to changing dh-make to not install .la files by default, as has already been suggested in this thread, I think we should look to get the desired behavior out of the common helpers (dh and cdbs) by default. As a first pass, taking into account all the caveats Russ has pointed out from Policy 10.2, I think we should get these helpers to strip out dependency_libs which AFAIK is safe for all uses. Once that's made its way through the archive, we could consider going further and avoid shipping .la files in /usr/lib at all by default. I exclude classic debhelper from the reckoning here, because I don't see that such .la file cleaning fits well in any of the existing dh_ tools (it would probably be unexpected to have, say, dh_makeshlibs suddenly start editing .la files), so we can probably only pick this up automatically for packages that use a common helper for their debhelper command sequencing. -- Steve Langasek Give me a lever long enough and a Free OS Debian Developer to set it on, and I can move the world. Ubuntu Developer http://www.debian.org/ slangasek@ubuntu.com vorlon@debian.org
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