[Mageia-dev] [RFC] Removing .la files

[Ahmad Samir]

On 9 June 2011 19:35, Dexter Morgan <dmorganec at gmail.com> wrote:
> Hello,
>
> as other distributions we started to remove .la files from mageia
> during mageia 1 development.
>
> Unfortunatly we didn't had enough time to finish this.
>
> I restarted this task today.
>
>
> Please tell me if a build fails because of a missing la file.
>

>From building pidgin-libnotify locally:
libtool: link: cannot find the library `/usr/lib64/libatk-1.0.la' or
unhandled argument `/usr/lib64/libatk-1.0.la'

>From the chroot:
$ cd usr/lib64/
$ grep libatk-1.0.la *
libindicate-gtk.la:dependency_libs=' /usr/lib64/libindicate.la
/usr/lib64/libgtk-x11-2.0.la /usr/lib64/libgdk-x11-2.0.la
/usr/lib64/libatk-1.0.la /usr/lib64/libpangocairo-1.0.la
/usr/lib64/libpangoft2-1.0.la /usr/lib64/libgdk_pixbuf-2.0.la
/usr/lib64/libcairo.la /usr/lib64/libpixman-1.la
/usr/lib64/libXrender.la /usr/lib64/libX11.la /usr/lib64/libxcb.la
/usr/lib64/libXau.la /usr/lib64/libXdmcp.la -lpng12
/usr/lib64/libpango-1.0.la /usr/lib64/libfontconfig.la
/usr/lib64/libfreetype.la /usr/lib64/libxml2.la -lm
/usr/lib64/libdbusmenu-glib.la /usr/lib64/libgio-2.0.la -lresolv -lz
/usr/lib64/libgmodule-2.0.la -ldl -ldbus-glib-1 -ldbus-1
/usr/lib64/libgobject-2.0.la /usr/lib64/libgthread-2.0.la -lpthread
/usr/lib64/libglib-2.0.la /usr/lib64/libpcre.la -lrt'


I don't think just building packages and removing the .la will work,
the inter-dependency is too wide, I count too many .la files up there.

Reading these:
http://wiki.debian.org/ReleaseGoals/LAFileRemoval
http://lists.debian.org/debian-devel/2009/08/msg00783.html

it looks like Debian are using sed to remove the .la files from
dependency_libs field in .la files, there's a debhelper script, IIUC
it's run before they build a package.

This means it's something that a script run as root in the chroot can
do, but I guess it needs to be fine-tuned.

Meanwhile, just removing .la files will break a lot of builds (note
that we have a lot of packages to rebuild for e.g. new libnotify major
in Cauldron)... :(

-- 
Ahmad Samir