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

[Michael Scherer]

Le vendredi 10 juin 2011 à 03:47 +0300, Ahmad Samir a écrit :
> 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.

Could you explain the rational of removing them ?

AFAIK, the .la removal was not discussed, so starting by saying "we
remove them now because last time, we didn't discussed and it broke lots
of thing" is a little bit weird.


> > 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)... :(

Ie, we need to remove them in the proper order. 
One first step would be to find the dependency tree ( should be
basically the same as BuildRequires ) and start bu shaving the leafs.

-- 
Michael Scherer