Re: [gentoo-dev] Re: Re: .la files and their future on Gentoo

[Angelo Arrifano <miknix@gentoo.org>]

On 05-10-2010 03:55, Diego Elio Pettenò wrote:
> Il giorno lun, 04/10/2010 alle 11.19 -0400, Richard Freeman ha scritto:
>>
>> That said, supporting this use case should not interfere with more
>> mainstream use of the distro.  I like the USE flag proposal because it
>> lets us have our cake and eat it too.  Those who don't need .la files
>> don't get them except where absolutely essential, and those who need
>> and
>> are willing to live with tons of them can have it their way. 
> 
> USE flags add complexity, and in real use cases there are near to no
> good reasons at all to keep .la files around.

Like Richard said "Gentoo is about choice...

By removing .la files, you are taking away that choice from the user.
For you they might be useless, for some user (or entire software house)
it can be its holly grail for library versioning and linking. I don't
really feel like forcing users to change their build setups just because
we think they are useless, do you?
- It is decisions like this one that *might* give us bad reputation.

Should we also start removing package-config files just because there
are better ways to detect if a certain package is installed?
> 
> I don't want to sound like a douchebag, but can you (or anyone else
> supporting the USE flag notion) explain what .la files actually do?

You don't sound like a douchebag, just someone who wants to force stuff
into others. It happens all the time when we have strong feelings about
something or when we think we are totally correct. - But hey, guess
what? The world spins around sun after all.
> 
> What I'm quite sure of is that about half the people who express their
> opinion regarding .la files have no idea what they are used for, they
> expect them to be some kind of magic problem-solving fairy dust. They
> are not.

Careful.. There is people that might take this as an "attack"..
> 
> They are a legacy of older operating system and static linking notions;
> they are also not magical enough as they are only consumed back by
> libtool. And not all the packages out there use libtool to link the
> final application even if they were to use autotools.
> 
>