On Fri, Jan 16, 2009 at 03:05:33PM +0000, Philip Martin wrote:
> Stefan Sperling <stsp_at_elego.de> writes:
>
> > A question I'd really like an answer to:
> > Does anyone know the rational behind what libtool does
> > and requires (using .la files to link against libraries),
> > and the rational behind not following these requirements
> > on some systems (not installing .la files on the system)?
>
> Libtool resolves library dependencies recursively. This makes libtool
> portable to lots of systems, but it upsets some distributions by
> introducing unnecessary explicit dependencies. See section 4:
>
> http://www.netfort.gr.jp/~dancer/column/libpkg-guide/libpkg-guide.html#shlibdependency
Hmmm... I'm afraid I don't see the problem.
It says there was a workaround for the problem Debian is seeing (wasted
memory by loading some redundant code), which is to pass --as-needed
to ld. This does not work with libtool due to a bug in it, the bug ticket
they're referring to is from 2006.
To me this looks like either this bug is really hard to fix and
they are still trying to fix it after 3 years, or they are actually
pushing the problems of missing .la files to people like us in order
to save a small bit of memory -- like that was really worth the many
hours being wasted by Subversion developers to fix problems that are
specific to Debian...
So I don't understand what the gain is supposed to be.
OpenBSD runs on very low-end systems, too, and no one there deletes
.la files to save memory, to the best of my knowledge.
Stefan
Received on 2009-01-17 01:29:26 CET