On Sat, Jan 17, 2009 at 01:29, Stefan Sperling <stsp_at_elego.de> wrote:
> 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.
Look. This is quite simple: .la files are not necessary to a system.
My Mac doesn't ship with them, yet a hojillion things are able to link
against my system libraries. There is no reason that we should
*REQUIRE* those stupid .la files. Subversion was able to link against
*most* of its dependencies without needing any .la files, *except* for
serf and neon. Jeremy has now made it possible to link against them,
too, when no .la files are present.
Could we avoid using libtool? Sure. Does it help us? Yes. As I recall,
one of its benefits was around figuring out dependencies among dev
libraries, vs installed libraries.
But you know? I just don't care. I got our make file set up like 8
years ago, and the linking rules generally work. I've forgotten most
of that stuff cuz it just isn't interesting. So sure. Maybe we don't
know much about the tool any more. Maybe we could work without it.
Feel free to fix it. But until you do, I don't see what you're making
such a big fuss about. Jeremy improved things. What's your issue?
-g
------------------------------------------------------
http://subversion.tigris.org/ds/viewMessage.do?dsForumId=462&dsMessageId=1029920
Received on 2009-01-17 04:00:31 CET