Re: 1.3.0-rc2: Can not build on FreeBSd out-of-box: FreeBSD doesn't has '*.la' files.

[Lev Serebryakov]
> They are useless. ELF has enought information in SO files to perform
> all proper linkage. And these small '*.la' files is only a waste of
> inodes and disk blocks.

There's one use case: static linking. Nobody does it anymore, but if
anyone *did* they would be glad for the .la files so they wouldn't have
to already know what depends on what.

I just got done telling the subversion 1.2.x (haven't built 1.3.x yet)
Debian port to please ignore '{apr,apu,neon}-config --libs' in favor of
simple hard-coded values. Suddenly the ELF binaries no longer have to
link such nifty stuff as openldap, openssl, expat, libxml or zlib.
This in turn significantly simplifies our dependency graph. (In
Debian, dependencies are largely derived from ELF headers.)

Peter