To all port maintainers: libtool

[Bryan Drewery]

On 5/8/14, 5:16 PM, Tijl Coosemans wrote:
> On Thu, 8 May 2014 21:27:56 +0200 Alexander Leidinger wrote:
>> On Thu, 8 May 2014 00:24:20 +0200
>> Tijl Coosemans <tijl at FreeBSD.org> wrote:
>>> USES=libtool modifiers :keepla and :oldver.
>>
>> You wasn't explicit, which may be beneficial for people which don't
>> have English as their first language...
>>
>> Is it right that you tell everyone to replace "USE_AUTOTOOLS=YES" with
>> "USES=libtool:keepla:oldver" now?
>
> No, it is either USES=libtool, USES=libtool:keepla or USES=libtool:oldver.
> Most ports will eventually use the first form but for the time being many
> may have to use :keepla or :oldver.
>
> To know which one to use you can follow these steps:
>
> If a port does not install any libraries always use USES=libtool.  If it
> does, try USES=libtool:keepla.  If this causes the major version number
> of a library to change, use USES=libtool:oldver.
>
> You can upgrade USES=libtool:oldver to USES=libtool:keepla if
> 1) an update to a new version of the port would have changed the
>     library version anyway, or
> 2) you grep /usr/ports/INDEX-* for your port and find that only a
>     dozen or so other ports depend on it so bumping PORTREVISION on
>     them isn't that bad.
>
> You can upgrade USES=libtool:keepla to USES=libtool if you grep
> /usr/ports/INDEX-* for your port and verify that all of the ports
> that install .la files also have some form of USES=libtool in their
> Makefile.  Unless the number of dependent ports is small I don't
> really recommend this.  There's no harm in keeping .la files.
>
>> And for ports with a large dependency chain behind you more or less
>> suggest to keep the modifiers until the ports tree is converted (let's
>> assume a port which is needed by all desktop environments, then we are
>> roughly speaking at about 3k ports or more which depend upon it, which
>> is close enough to "the ports tree" for this discussion ;-) )?
>
> Yes.  At some point ports with :oldver will be converted to :keepla.
> Depending on how many ports these are, this will probably happen in
> batches of related ports and may need to be coordinated by portmgr.
> I don't expect this to be something that individual port maintainers
> will have to worry about.
>
> And at another point the dependency records of all .la files will be
> empty in all ports (currently about 1400 ports left).  From then on
> it will be safe to replace USES=libtool:keepla with USES=libtool.
>

I don't know what .la files are used for and have no time currently to 
research it.

What is the impact to non-ports consumers of removing .la files? Do they 
also need patches to make them build?

And if there is no impact, I am thoroughly confused on when to keep or 
not keep them.

-- 
Regards,
Bryan Drewery