Some thoughts on the modularization effort

[Shawn Starr]

*.la files are just pointer files for libtool to help GNU ld/ other ld to 
figure out what a specific library link dependency is and other info.

"Libtool Archive file -- a library file used by the linker on platforms
not so familiar with gnu tools, meant to aide linking to code in the
library on non-Linux platforms."

"An ever increasing number of packages are using libtool to do their linking. 
The latest GNU libtools (>= 1.3a) can take advantage of installed libtool 
archive files (`*.la'). The main advantage of libtool's .la files is that it 
allows libtool to store and subsequently access metadata with respect to the 
libraries it builds.  libtool will search for those files, which contain a 
lot of useful information about a library (e.g. dependency libraries for 
static linking). Also, they're essential for programs using libltdl."

Shawn.

On April 3, 2005 19:09, Alan Coopersmith wrote:
> Egbert Eich wrote:
> > There are already some autotooled bits of the X.Org tree that use
> > autotools. It may be interesting to see them built on non-Linux and
> > non-BSD platforms and get some 'numbers' which would help us making
> > decisions on the libtool issue.
>
> I've not had time to look into it much, but have built software on
> Solaris that uses libtools and it mostly seems to work for the simple
> cases, though *.la files need to be deleted everywhere they show up or
> things get really broken.   Since rm *.la is so easy, I've never taken
> the time to look into what they are supposed to do and what's going wrong.
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