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

[Christiaan Welvaart]

On Fri, 10 Jun 2011, Olav Vitters wrote:

> On Fri, Jun 10, 2011 at 04:35:57PM +0200, Christiaan Welvaart wrote:
>> On Fri, 10 Jun 2011, Olav Vitters wrote:
>>
>>> On Fri, Jun 10, 2011 at 04:15:01PM +0200, Christiaan Welvaart wrote:
....

>>>>> Seems some distributions misunderstand the need and changed the wiki
>>>>> page. Removing .la files is needed however, otherwise you'll quickly mix
>>>>> distribution installed libraries and self-compiled libraries.
>>>>
>>>> What are you talking about here?
>>
>> <gnome-shell stuff>
>
> It is not gnome-shell, it is jhbuild and doing development (mainly
> GNOME). Basic GNOME already has ~200 modules.

Then why did you quote the webpage instead of saying just that?

>> So you are really talking only about gnome-shell, which I can't even
>> test because apparently it doesn't work in a VM. It is now packaged,
>> so you don't need to build it.
>
> Nope, I'm talking about doing development using jhbuild. E.g. if you
> want to contribute to GNOME, you'll have to get rid of all the .la
> files no matter which distribution you use.
>
> A new GNOME does not happen automatically. It requires people to compile
> the Git versions and committing stuff until a tarball is released and
> packaged.
>
> Making such development easier would result in a better GNOME, and I
> don't mind if the .la files stay, but prefer if they are removed.

I think doing software development related to the system you're working on 
isn't easy. For example jhbuild may not like .la files but if you want to 
use static libraries supplied by the system, .la files are quite useful 
AFAIK.

So why did you point to that webpage if it's not related to mageia at all, 
it's purely a jhbuild problem. If people are using a system with gnome 
installed to develop gnome, it's not strange they run into problems. And I 
wonder why they would have gnome related -devel packages installed in the 
first place, they're not needed to *use* the system software.


     Christiaan