Re: Bug#539687: marked as done (libogg-dev: Removal of .la should have been coordinated with other packages)
Peter Samuelson wrote:
> [Erik de Castro Lopo]
> > I'm think I'm coming in rather late on this, but why were these .la
> > files removed? I've read through bug#539687 and its still not clear.
>
> I can't speak for Ron,
Thanks Peter, you'll do.
> but in general, the reason to remove .la files
> is that pkg-config (and the .pc files in /usr/lib/pkgconfig) offers the
> same functionality, and more, with considerably less brokenness.
I'm a big fan of pkg-config. Its a good solution to the problem.
> We'd
> like to encourage upstreams to ship .pc files and use pkg-config in
> their configure.ac scripts as the primary means of detecting the
> presence of other libraries and how to use them.
And libsndfile has been using pkg-config for detecting all the libraries
it uses for at least three years.
The problem is that using the default pkg-config/autoconf/automake/libtool
behaviour to detect libxyz that ships libxyz.la file will create a
(probably unnecessary) dependency on that libxyz.la file.
I know this is 20/20 hindsight, but this could have been handled much
better by raising bugs against and fixing all the client libraries
*before* removing the libogg.la. It would probably also be a good idea
to discourage the shipping .la files in the debian policy manual and
adding it as a lintian warning.
Cheers,
Erik
--
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Erik de Castro Lopo
http://www.mega-nerd.com/
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