Re: [gentoo-dev] Re: Please review: function epunt_la_files for eutils.eclass

[Peter Alfredsen <loki_val@gentoo.org>]

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On Friday 14 November 2008, Ryan Hill wrote:
> > [Snip more pie-in-the-sky]
> >
> > Show me the code, please.  
>
> If you weren't interested in hearing differing opinions, then why did
> you ask in the first place? :P

I just thought it sounded like a tall order, saying that fixing 
libtool .la files would take some weekends to do, when this problem has 
existed for so long, yet noone has been able to fix it in a way that 
causes less pain than removal of all .la files does. IOW, I will 
believe promises of code when I see it.

I won't be touching libtool. You can break that thing by just looking at 
it the wrong way. It'll eval your buttocks off and expr your behind, 
it's .3 MB of all posix-sh and it will make you regret you ever tried 
to wrap your head around it.

[in re pulseaudio, I believed the news for 0.9.1 
http://www.pulseaudio.org/wiki/OldNews]

[Responding to the rest of the thread]

I've given this some thought and I think I've been convinced that 
dberkholz' position is probably the most tenable. If this is to be 
done, we should do it in a documented "Gentooish" way. The problem with 
going down the FEATURES road are two-fold:
1) What should the behavior of the FEATURES flag be?

I think it should act like an INSTALL_MASK="*.la" and 
EXTRA_ECONF="--disable-static"

There should also be a function, let's call it "exemptthis.la" that 
would exempt a .la file from being punted, so the RESTRICT could be 
made on a per-la file basis.

2) Who implements in portage?

[...I know nothing of portage internals...]

3) Grunt work?

This should be rather easy. Just assign the bugs to me and I shall add 
RESTRICTs as-needed.

But the problem is that we've known about this for aeons and nothing has 
been done about it. Diego tried to do something with popt and another 
package some time ago (bug 218286) but he was mostly shouted down and 
nobody touched it since.

On .so bumps I've silently dropped .la files, which I think is the more 
gradualistic approach and it also has the advantage of causing only 
little or no (extra) breakage, but for the whole tree it could take 
decades, since some libs don't do .so bumps. 

Anyway, we really need to start punting .la files one way or the other. 
For desktop users of our distro, they do a lot more harm than good. For 
embedded, perhaps static linking serves some purpose, but really, if 
you can't afford dynamic linking, what are you going to run on your 
board?

-- 
/PA

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