[gentoo-science] la files for sci-libs/mpir

[gentoo-science] la files for sci-libs/mpir

[Thomas Kahle]

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Hi science devs,

An amd64 arch tester asked me to 'remove the .la files' from mpir.  I
must admit that I still don't see through this.  Not all .la files are
evil, or are they?  Should the ones coming with mpir not be installed?

Thanks for any hints,
Thomas

-- 
Thomas Kahle
http://dev.gentoo.org/~tomka/

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Re: [gentoo-science] la files for sci-libs/mpir

[Christopher Schwan]

On Saturday 13 August 2011 23:40:58 you wrote:
> Hi science devs,
> 
> An amd64 arch tester asked me to 'remove the .la files' from mpir.  I
> must admit that I still don't see through this.  Not all .la files are
> evil, or are they?  Should the ones coming with mpir not be installed?
> 
> Thanks for any hints,
> Thomas

Hi Thomas,

most of the time they are just unnecessary - if you do not install both shared 
and static libraries I suggest to drop them. I am not an expert, but Flameeyes 
has some enlightening post on his blog, e.g.

    http://blog.flameeyes.eu/2008/04/14/what-about-those-la-files

I suggest you simply use the autotool-utils.eclass (mpir uses autotools, 
right?) which take care of them. The eclass' manpage provides a nice example 
how to achieve this behavior (note the use of "static-libs" USE-flag).

Cheers,
Christopher

Re: [gentoo-science] la files for sci-libs/mpir

[Christoph Junghans]

Hi Thomas,

2011/8/14 Thomas Kahle <tomka@gentoo.org>:
> An amd64 arch tester asked me to 'remove the .la files' from mpir.  I
> must admit that I still don't see through this.  Not all .la files are
> evil, or are they?  Should the ones coming with mpir not be installed?
That depends on what depends on mpir!

Basically the .la files contain all dependencies of a library, but
only a GNU build system using libtool makes use of these files, other
build systems like cmake don't.

However there are two cases, where it is 100% safe to delete the .la files:
1.) mpir comes with a pkg-config (.pc) file.
2.) mpir only installs a shared libs, which have an internal
dependencies memory.

But i guess the use of the autotool-utils eclass together with
static-libs useflag is the best solution.

Cheers,

Christoph

>
> Thanks for any hints,
> Thomas
>
> --
> Thomas Kahle
> http://dev.gentoo.org/~tomka/
>