On Mon, Apr 14, 2008 at 10:40:24PM +0200, Stefan Sperling wrote:
> On Mon, Apr 14, 2008 at 07:45:29PM +0100, Joe Orton wrote:
> > > Linking against libneon.la doesn't cause these problems.
> >
> > Right - doing anything else is wrong. This change is not necessary for
> > any released version of neon, so I can only presume it's to work around
> > the broken Debian packaging of neon? If so it's certainly a bad idea;
> > tolerating bad packaging behaviour just encourages it. Just get people
> > to complain to Debian about the broken packaging, it will give them more
> > motivation to fix it.
>
> I'm confused. FreeBSD seems to not install .la files at all[1].
Good luck out there :)
> You are saying this is wrong. So does the Debian packaging policy[2].
I think that may be out-of-date with current Debian practice.
> Yet this neon.m4 patch was made because of an error building on Debian!
>
> I don't know what the correct thing to do is, but it seems strange that
> there are so deeply contradicting opinions on the issue.
Some people who have experience of building complex cross-platform build
systems think that libtool .la files are useful and design build systems
to use them in various ways. Some people building single-platform Unix
distributions think that libtool .la files are the root of all evil,
because of some side-effects of their use which propagate shared library
dependencies.
So, the distro people (Fedora included, this is not just some
anti-Debian bias of mine) expend a lot of engineering effort trying to
eradicate .la files (rather than, e.g. changing libtool to avoid the
undesirable side-effects). These two worlds then necessarily come into
conflict when the build systems designed to use .la files start failing
in their absence.
I hope that's a fair characterisation of the situation ;)
FWIW, in the Fedora neon package we use a trivial one-line sed command
to avoid propagating shared library dependencies, without removing the
.la file and breaking builds. This is the same solution I advocated to
Peter in the Debian bug report on this subject, way back when.
Regards,
joe
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Received on 2008-04-14 23:20:20 CEST