Re: Confusion about Libtool archive (*.la) files in -dev' packages
Hi,
I'm finally back into the swing of things and am back on this list.
Sorry for the delay.
On 1 Jul, Andrew Pimlott wrote:
> I'm not qualified to recommend anything unfortunately. From my limited
> understanding, including the .la files in the -dev package makes sense if
> only for dependencies among static libraries. I did note that libtool
> appeared to claim that .la files could be useful for non-development use of
> the library, specifically explicit loading and linking; however my gut
> reaction is "that's not necessary on sane systems like Debian!".
Take a look at the May debian-policy archives over this topic. In the
end, there was a consensus that they are useful. In fact, it was one
of the libtool maintainers (Thomas Tanner) that asked me to get Debian
to include `.la' files in our packages.
> You should include libtool maintainer Alexandre Oliva <oliva@dcc.unicamp.br>
FYI, he's not the only libtool maintainer. :) We did have one of the
libtool maintainers (Gary V. Vaughan) participate in the discussion over
libtool `.la' files, back in May. He did a good job of explaining why
we should include `.la' files in our packages.
> in the conversation. He's a bit stubborn (as you probably recall), but
> always seems to present strong arguments. (You can tell him I said that--we
> just got into an argument over bug tracking.) At least he'll be able to
> verify the accuracy of your proposed policy addition.
This is no longer proposal. It achieved consensus, and is supposed to
become part of Debian policy.
Unfortunately, I was on vacation for three weeks so I couldn't deal
with some of the question that came up, e.g. from Manoj.
Manoj, I'll try to provide some the clarifications you wanted. My
apologies if someone already did.
My "wording" post from May 9 was:
Wording to go in to what is currently section 4.3 "Shared Libraries" in
the policy manual (toward the end of the section):
Libtool can make use of the meta-data contained in `.la' files. They
are also essential for packages that use the libtool `libltdl' library.
Any package that uses libtool to generated shared libraries will
generate `.la' files. If your package generates libtool libraries, i.e.
`.la' files, then you should include them in your library `-dev'
package.
---------------
There is one change that I'd like to make. Libraries that uses
libtool's `libltdl' library *must* include the `.la' files in the
run-time library package since libltdl can make use of it. Here is my
suggested wording to go into policy instead of my previous post (listed
above):
*********************
Libtool can make use of the meta-data contained in `.la' files. They
are also essential for packages that use the libtool `libltdl' library.
Any package that uses libtool to generated shared libraries will
generate `.la' files. If your package generates libtool libraries, i.e.
`.la' files, then you should include them in your library `-dev'
package or your run-time library package if it relies on libtool's
`libltdl' library.
*********************
HTH,
-Ossama
--
Ossama Othman <othman@cs.wustl.edu>
Center for Distributed Object Computing, Washington University, St. Louis
58 60 1A E8 7A 66 F4 44 74 9F 3C D4 EF BF 35 88 1024/8A04D15D 1998/08/26
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