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

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

On Tue, 2011-03-29 at 12:15 -0400, Colin Walters wrote:
> On Tue, Mar 29, 2011 at 12:03 PM, Richard Purdie
> <richard.purdie@linuxfoundation.org> wrote:
> 
> > 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.
> 
> Would you take an option, off by default then?  I definitely do not
> want these files in my OS; I could remove them in a
> ROOTFS_POSTPROCESS_COMMAND, but it'd be even better to do in after
> each build.

I can do better than that, we have some limitations in the way .conf
files are parsed compared to .bbclass files. If you create a
"localchanges.bbclass" containing:

autotools_do_install_append () {
       # Also kill off .la files; they are wholly unnecessary and actually can
       # break things; see:
       # https://live.gnome.org/GnomeShell/RemovingLaFiles
       # http://wiki.debian.org/ReleaseGoals/LAFileRemoval
       find ${D}${libdir} -name '*.la' -delete
}

and then do INHERIT += "localchanges" you should have this doing what
you want though. You can create a classes/ directory for the .bbclass
along side you conf files (or add a layer for your customisations).

> > 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.
> 
> The core problem arises in that often for developers it's convenient
> to do partial builds; say only rebuild glib and gtk+, but not rebuild
> pango (which lies between them).  What the libtool pango.la file does
> is add -L/usr/lib which is 1) unnecessary and 2) forces the linker
> search first in /usr/lib instead of /opt/gnome like we want.

Right, but with our build environment, this really becomes a non-issue
(and I've been trying to get patches upstream which stop -L/usr/lib
being injected anyway as that is a libtool bug).

Cheers,

Richard