Re: [patch] autotools: Remove .la files by default

[Richard Purdie <richard.purdie@linuxfoundation.org>]

On Tue, 2011-03-29 at 10:43 -0400, Colin Walters wrote:
> From 487753f1bbef085c558befba7f03b6b4f01f392d Mon Sep 17 00:00:00 2001
> From: Colin Walters <walters@verbum.org>
> Date: Tue, 29 Mar 2011 10:41:34 -0400
> Subject: [PATCH] autotools: Remove .la files by default
> 
> They are installed by libtool only to make automake's "make uninstall"
> work; but we don't care about that, since no one sane bases an
> operating system upgrade/uninstall procedure on automake.  Saner
> people use higher level abstractions like "packages" or pure image
> based synchronization.
> 
> They are otherwise unnecessary and actually can break things; see:
> https://live.gnome.org/GnomeShell/RemovingLaFiles
> http://wiki.debian.org/ReleaseGoals/LAFileRemoval

Much as I dislike libtool, I've not seen these files do us much harm and
they do sometimes give warning of linkage against things we shouldn't be
linking against. I want to try and stay close to standard libtool in the
hope we can get some of the more major problems we have like working
sysroot support sorted out.

So no, I'm not going to merge this patch at this time. If we were going
to do something like this I'd rather thrown out libtool entirely and
switch to something like dolt.

Also note in your gnome shell link above that its listed as required
because of "the dirty hacks that jhbuild plays to get it to sandbox your
system" which is hardly a glowing recommendation. We don't have this
problem.

Cheers,

Richard