Re: Old Release goal: Getting rid of unneeded *.la / emptying dependency_libs
Neil Williams <codehelp@debian.org> writes:
> The cases listed are the ones where the .la file can be removed.
> Packages with .la files which don't meet those criteria were not
> included in the list. However, it looks like there could be a flaw in
> the original data.
Indeed, there were a bunch of different problems, although mostly with my
understanding.
> The line in the original data is:
> shibboleth-sp2: dependency_libs links-not-existing-la
> The original criteria were:
> 1. "no flag" to remove the la-file on next occasion
> 2. only "dependency_libs" to remove their la-file RSN, because they
> block removal of the la-files on another package (this flag can be
> wrongly hit if a package depends only on itself - but well,
> dropping the la-file is recommended as well here as with 1.)
> 3. only "depended-on" to do nothing at this time
> 4. with both "dependency_libs depended-on" to use
> sed -i "s,^dependency_libs=.*,dependency_libs='',"
> on all their la-files (I took care that self-dependencies don't
> appear in this category, but rather in 1 or 2).
> So where is the error? In the original data?
No, indeed, dependency_libs should be stripped from those files. It
doesn't need to be, really, since it's obviously never used by anything
(referencing non-existent files as it does), but for cleanliness it should
go anyway.
I believe the *.la files need to stay since I think upstream is loading
modules that way, but I will double-check. But they're harmless for
Debian as a whole.
>> Lintian already checks that *.la files don't contain the problematic
>> dependency_libs setting.
This apparently just isn't true. I could have sworn that we had a check,
but we apparently do not. We definitely should. That's probably why
there are so many problems; I suspect a lot of them would go away if there
were a Lintian check.
--
Russ Allbery (rra@debian.org) <http://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/>
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