Re: [gentoo-dev] [PATCH] autotools-utils.eclass: punt unnecessary .la files even w/ USE=static-libs.

[Samuli Suominen <ssuominen@gentoo.org>]

On 09/13/2011 12:51 AM, Donnie Berkholz wrote:
> On 00:46 Tue 13 Sep     , Samuli Suominen wrote:
>>> If I understand correctly, this will break for any packages that 
>>> don't use pkg-config to link. The maintainers will manually need to 
>>> add pkg-config calls to the ebuilds of anything that could 
>>> statically link against a library using only libtool and not 
>>> pkg-config. Is that accurate?
>>
>> Yes, seems accurate.
>>
>> I can think of 'export PKG_CONFIG="$($(tc-getPKG_CONFIG) --static)' or 
>> something like 'export FOO_LIBS="$($(tc-getPKG_CONFIG) --libs --static 
>> foo)"' to accomplish getting static flags from an ebuild using 
>> toolchain-funcs.eclass if required.
>>
>> Or they do it like lvm2 and cryptsetup at upstream level and add 
>> support for statically linking the tools in the build-system.
>>
>> The .la files are not helping packages not using libtool in any case, 
>> for example, those using cmake as build-system.
>>
>> And I've yet to see a real, in portage residing, example of where this 
>> would really break anything and when I will, I'll gladly help 
>> migrating it to the example mentioned above... Overall, corner cases 
>> that can be easily worked around, yet punting the *harmful* .la files.
> 
> That's rather shocking. All it would take is trying to statically build 
> a package not using pkg-config that links against anything X11-related 
> (since all of them have .pc files).

Those packages that have pkg-config file, like libX11, are meant to be
used through pkg-config, so the bug would be in the package not using
the .pc, not in the package lacking the .la

> It's probably more that "nobody" cares about static building than that 
> there aren't packages that would break.

I'm looking forward in catching those packages trying to link statically
to a package providing valid pkg-config file, yet not using it...