On Sun, Mar 27, 2011 at 10:16:18PM -0500, Dale wrote:
> Frank Peters wrote:
> > Hello,
> >
> > The latest GTK+-2.24.3 failed to build on my system because of the
> > following error:
> >
> > /bin/grep: /usr/lib64/libX11.la: No such file or directory
> > /bin/sed: can't read /usr/lib64/libX11.la: No such file or directory
> > libtool: link: `/usr/lib64/libX11.la' is not a valid libtool archive
> >
> > The libX11.la that is missing should be in the x11-libs/libX11 package.
> > But why is libX11.la missing?
> >
> > I can emerge libX11 using USE="static-libs" or USE="-static-libs"
> > but libX11.la is not produced in either case.
> >
> > The emerge log when building libX11 always shows the following:
> >
> > Removing unnecessary ... x11-libs/libX11-1.4.2/image/usr/lib64/libX11-xcb.la
> > Removing unnecessary ... x11-libs/libX11-1.4.2/image/usr/lib64/libX11.la
> >
> > So the .la files are being produced but are being removed afterwards.
> >
> > Does anyone else have a missing /usr/lib64/libX11.la file?
> >
> > Frank Peters
> >
> >
> >    
> 
> I think I read on -dev that .la files were being removed.  It seems to 
> have been causing trouble when packages were being updating that were 
> linked against each other.  So, they made things so that they would work 
> without them and removed them.

Yeah, something like this.

The problem is that other .la files in /usr/lib* will directly
reference libX11.la. Thus, when libtool is used by GTK+ to link
against some library it depends on _other_ than libX11, that other
library will say ``I need /usr/lib64/libX11.la''. libtool tries to
load this file and give you the lovely error message above.

What you essentially need to do is find all /usr/lib*/lib*.la file
which contain the string ``libX11.la'' and remove ``libX11.la'' from
those files and/or just delete those .la files which have
``libX11.la'' in them. In my experience,
$ rm /usr/lib??/lib*.la
fixes such problems just fine.

*However*, people will probably recommend you install lafilefixer and
run
$ lafilefixer --justfixit

However, I've never done this myself so I'm just regurgitating what
I've heard from others... ;-). (I use the unofficial portage-multilib
branch of portage which almost completely disables .la file
installation and thus I _never_ hit this sort of ``can't find
libX11.la'' problem anymore.)

> That is oversimplified since it was a while back but I think that is 
> normal nowadays.  Someone correct me if I am wrong on this.
> 
> Dale
> 
> :-)  :-)
> 

-- 
binki

Look out for missing apostrophes!