NOT installing the .la files

[Mikhail Teterin]

On Friday 16 June 2006 02:16, Michael Nottebrock wrote:
= > Unless there is a convincing example of things breaking without an .la
= > file, these should be deleted.
= 
= You know it doesn't work that way around. Prove that it's safe, before you
= go ahead and potentially break everyone's installations out there.

The consensus *was* that the .la files aren't needed. Either I missed the 
discussion on their restoration on ports@ (PRs don't count), or the burden of 
proof, that they are neccessary is on *you* :-)

= There's convincing evidence it's not - after all, the old libtool *was*
= patched in order to support this (and still never quite did for everything,
= I and kde@ should know), while the current one is not.

I am not "breaking everyone's installation out there". I'm simply advocating, 
that ports should not install their .la files -- as things used to be. The 
only argument against it so far was that maintaining a local hack in libtool 
for was too difficult for the libtool maintainers (not that they would allow 
anyone else into their fiefdom to maintain it, though). Fine, a port can 
simply delete its own .la files in post-install.

NOW the second argument is offered: that the .la files are actually needed -- 
I don't see, where that is. You are saying, that's _going to happen_ because 
we are "in transition". Well, that seems like a transition for the worse, and 
I consider ports, that require .la files to be broken...

The lt_dlopen, et. al are ugly hacks intended for poorly maintained legacy 
operating systems. FreeBSD does not need them and any software _ported_ to it 
should be patched to use the standard interfaces and APIs.

Somewhere somehow minizing a porter's headache (however important) became of 
higher priority over the cleanliness of the port and even of the performance 
of the built software. We really ought to stop this trend...

	-mi