NOT installing the .la files

[Michael Nottebrock]

On Monday, 12. June 2006 11:22, Alexander Leidinger wrote:
> Quoting Mikhail Teterin <mi+kde at aldan.algebra.com> (from Sun, 11 Jun
>
> 2006 21:51:36 -0400):
> > On Sunday 11 June 2006 21:21, Mark Linimon wrote:
> > = Unavoidable, for KDE; and thus, not worth spending all the time
> > modifying = ports to either install them or not.  This makes maintainance
> > a lot easier.
> >
> > Well, they are all installed by the same ${LOCALBASE}/bin/libtool
> >
> > 	/bin/sh /opt/bin/libtool  --mode=install /usr/bin/install -c \
> > 		libmimetic.la /opt/lib/libmimetic.la
> >
> > The script is installed by its port, which could patch it to ignore the
> > .la files altogether -- keeping the maintaince of the rest of the ports
> > just as simple and the filesystem slightly cleaner
> >
> > There are 321 .la files on my system, for example. Do I need this junk?
>
> If you use KDE: yes (maybe not all, but some of them).

See https://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=93359 for details (especially my 
comment, and the very last comment - we already implement the first half of 
my recipe in the current KDE port, btw).

Also, please don't further spread this meme that this some lame KDE thing: The 
real trouble and reason for this change was that the upstream libtool is 
*not* designed to completely work without libtool archives and that our 
present libtool maintainer (rightfully) refuses to maintain a quick hack that 
was made (and then abandoned) by someone else years and years ago, probably 
with the assumption that libtool might never change much from there.

KDE uses the libtool archives the way it does for the same reason: If they're 
around anyway, might as well use them.

In any case: Libtool archives were insignificant, small and not worth worrying 
about even back when the original hack was put in place. In the gigabyte-age, 
they're even less worth worrying about. Going back and forth 
between 'needed', 'mostly-not-needed' and again 'needed' is somewhat 
annoying, admittedly, but there's lessons to be learned here about making 
unnecessary code-forks and premature optimizations.

With that rant off my chest - yes, there's still ways to avoid having libtool 
archives flying around, but they all involve making (and maintaining) 
patches, dealing with tricky-to-fix, unexpected fallout every once in a while 
and headaches once the next round of autotools updates comes along.


Cheers,
-- 
   ,_,   | Michael Nottebrock               | lofi at freebsd.org
 (/^ ^\) | FreeBSD - The Power to Serve     | http://www.freebsd.org
   \u/   | K Desktop Environment on FreeBSD | http://freebsd.kde.org
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