To all port maintainers: libtool

[Bryan Drewery]

On 6/6/14, 9:27 AM, Tijl Coosemans wrote:
> On Fri, 06 Jun 2014 15:02:24 +0200 Alexander Leidinger wrote:
>> Quoting Tijl Coosemans <tijl at freebsd.org> (from Thu, 5 Jun 2014
>> 18:53:03 +0200):
>>> On Thu, 05 Jun 2014 09:39:21 -0500 Bryan Drewery wrote:
>>>> 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?
>>>
>>> Removing a .la file is somewhat like a library version bump.  Anything
>>> that depends on it needs to be recompiled.
>>
>> I remember from tests waaaaay in the past that not all programs will
>> be happy when the .la files are not there. I remember that I once
>> tried to remove the .la files but it didn't work as the program wanted
>> to open the .la files (after recompile). Maybe libltdl is openening
>> them? Did you make some checks/tests in this regard?
>
> Essentially .la files are small shell scripts that set some variables so
> in theory they can be used in all kinds of places, but this seems of
> little practical value.  Libltdl can open and parse .la files (to find
> the name of the .so file it can dlopen) but it can also work directly
> with .so files.
>
> If a program uses .la files directly then the port can't delete them of
> course, but so far I haven't encountered such programs.
>

My main question was non-ports consumers though. What is the impact on 
them? We're talking a lot about bumping revisions and forcing rebuilds.

Will non-ports consumers require rebuild or changes if .la files are
missing?

Would these non-ports consumers be able to properly build and link
without .la files and without modifications? These .la files seem
similar to .pc files which are often critical to out-of-tree consumers
that assume Linux /usr paths instead of /usr/local paths.

-- 
Regards,
Bryan Drewery