NOT installing the .la files

[Mark Linimon]

On Fri, Jun 16, 2006 at 11:02:57AM -0400, Mikhail Teterin wrote:
> The consensus *was* that the .la files aren't needed. Either I missed the 
> discussion on their restoration on ports@

The consensus changed.

As lofi has said, the .la files are needed by certain ports on the system.
We used to try to keep them out of all the other ports that needed them --
but as dependencies changed, we wound up having to change those ports to
either include them, or exclude them as extra.

When the new libtool regime came in, aDe ditched the patching of libtool.
>From discussions he and portmgr and others had at the time, we decided
that it was simply easier to stop patching all these ports and include
the files everywhere.  A large number of plists have already been modified
to reflect this.

This is another one of those issues where we are never going to get 100%
agreement, so portmgr is just going to have to make an edict that "the
.la files stay in."  (I would have liked to get all of the portmgrs to
weigh in on this, which is why I have waited to step in here, but the
several that did are all in agreement.)

With nearly 15,000 ports, certain compromises have to be made to make
the maintainance tasks easier, even if that costs some inodes.  (The
Ports Collection is not optimized to minimize inodes ATM anyway).  This
is one such compromise.

As far as I am concerned, this needs to end the discussion so we can go
back to working on the harder problems.

mcl