Red Hat Bugzilla – Bug 172617
Remove .la files from neon-devel
Last modified: 2007-11-30 17:11:16 EST
Description of problem: .la files aren't strictly needed on Linux and causes a lot of problems when compiling since they hardcode absolute paths to dependent libraries. Version-Release number of selected component (if applicable): How reproducible: Steps to Reproduce: 1. 2. 3. Actual results: Expected results: Additional info:
Please everyone stop filing these bugs and go fix actual problems rather than papering over the symptoms. The .la files are part of the interface.
Well there seems to be agreement on this among a lot of your fellow colleagues and after talking with no less than four or five of them about this I decided to file bugs against the remaining ones I could find on my system. They've already been removed from 80% of the existing packages in fedora from what I can see, so how can the remaining 20% be part of the interface?
There are two cases it breaks: 1) where the package uses the .la file as a well-defined portable interface to link against the library (`neon-config --la-file`) 2) where other applications will use ltdl to open the library and you need to first determine whether or not one of these cases applies before filing these blanket "remove the .la file" requests.
Ok, thanks for the clarification and sorry for any noise created by filing these bugs.